Before the inept lips open.

Meeting

Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell.
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.

We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair – before the inept lips open.

Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely, skin unhappy…
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennæ stretch … waver … and almost … touch.

Comments

[Kevin]

This idea is about first-time meetings, but it seems to me that Tessimond is bemoaning his lack of touching anyone, ever. Aren't most of us happy just to talk to someone in the first instance, because we know that, if we end up liking them, we'll kiss/hug etc at some point in the future?

I'm not sure that animals have it over us in this department, because they're writhing all over each other for different reasons than those that Tessimond assumes. Their's is a biological imperative (sex, territory etc) rather than the emotional connection that the poet seems to imply.

[JRWB]

Isn't the poem saying that we might never get so far as touching (or more generally, connecting) with someone because "Our words […] intercept our meaning"? That words are always imprecise on some level, whereas touch is immediate, and not possible to misunderstand?