Delight
“One semblance circles me, a single movement” Pablo Neruda

We’re at it again, in the bed, on the bed, all over the bed,
rambling & rolling around in the almond orchards

where we first met & embraced one another like fireworks,
like the glowing thief & ghost of something trying to leave

the prison of separation & loneliness just to be paroled,
like scheduled, aromatic scents into the final divine,

& when I touch her in that place where the soul could be saved
from being in just one identity, she throws her head backwards,

her face then, truer than mere appearance & ghost-white now
& then suddenly reddened, & overwhelmed in pleasure

& quickly at the abolition of all boundary &, in response, I roll
my eyes upward, trying again to see where it is she’s rising to,

where it is she goes to, when that impediment wall, that skin,
is breached into heaven’s language, into spirit into substance

& back &, for a moment, I can’t contain what’s uprising
into me – me, still on top of her – for it’s like a ghost-scatter,

thick with a spray of white almond petals exploding themselves
upward, into my whole person. & I’m the thief & so I lapse

into intoxication, into that lawless, riotous, disobedient force
that finds its namelessness in me, in us, & she laughs then, at me,

at the criminal in me that’s lost & concluding itself in her,
& she wiggles my face back down, in to her, so she can kiss

the affluence from my face & make it hers, ours, forever,
& be a part of the divine that will remember the delight, after

we’re long gone & roaming through the almond groves –
in search of where the beginning of delight was, or is, again.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. He has a new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance forthcoming in 2022 from Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, and Crab Creek Review.