January 29th: Losing My Virginity

January 29th

Sometimes we wake not knowing

how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones.
                                     Mark Doty
                                     "Tiara"

When did it start to be some breach
of intimacy to think back with my hands
on the thighs of my houseguest memory

and ask do I remember my first time?  And when
did the first time become myopic and only one
man with his hands under my shirt

and the purity and sweat of that heat, of two
separate skins introducing themselves---how words
were the crudest invention

how they were heavy as duty or monogamy
or too early and so they stayed silent in the lode
of their own unmined coal?

And isn't mute exactly half a word away
from what did you say, a trace of yesterday
and the salt of the inside: my jaw my nose my tongue my lips:

those least known ago coves where all the
One small boat floated then broke mooring finally
in the third or more storm of the season:  I see hands

that abandoned it and welcome something
else (though what can't be foretold) after it navigated
the safety of the bay and the open water became birds and sky.

And along the way it became old growth claimed from what was recovered and then buried again for the ages, wiping away

the first time my lips touched the salt of such sea and soaked it imbedded in it the slightest can't live without this splinter and forever

rested inside it a burning, a pain with purpose and something else, something other than word except to ask: if, after it all sunk deep

the first time and a lot of years went by,

did riding in it ever come to mind,
like the first time he was between
or I was between the shucked hull

of intimacy, intoxicated and broke
open and no words not ever any words,
as one and then another one

knocked open the door came in
and felt right felt absolute and out-
side of any crime a mouth (who'd

forgotten its own first time or worse
named it blame and dirt)
could continue could clack, could

because nothing is holy to it, hold
the glow of each virginity up to the light
and grip and grit and grind it away

in the face of everything that's precious,
like sex in my old age say, or
the tide for being the tide, wind

for being wind, lover for being lover
of someone who's new every time who
could never lose, even that very first

time, my virginity any more than I could lose
my tongue or, under that tongue, the salt
in every press of love

I've gripped, and the welcome of it, the precious
bless of it, the first time every time
and the letting go of it.