Surreptitious Kissing
Surreptitious Kissing
by Denis Johnson
I want to say that
forgiveness keeps on
dividing, that hope
gives issue to hope,
and more, but of course I
am saying what is
said when in this dark
hallway one encounters
you, and paws and
assaults you—love
affairs, fast lies—and you
say it back and we
blunder deeper, as would
any pair of loosed
marionettess, any couple
of cadavers cut lately
from the scaffold,
in the secluded hallways
of whatever is
holding us up now.
I’m one of those rare people who isn’t really into Johnson’s fiction (I can never manage to hold on through a whole book), but the poetry of his that I’ve read is really good.