Most poems about kissing begin with beautiful lips. This one opens with "Lips that fade / That crack, that bleed / That chap, that grey," and the speaker answers in three blunt words: "These I kiss." The central idea is that real desire does not pick and choose. The speaker kisses the mouth as it is, with its lies, its cruelty, its dryness and its drool. By the end, that acceptance has grown into surrender to the kiss and to mortality itself.
The poem moves in waves, each closing on a refrain. The first wave is a catalogue of mouths in the plural: cracked lips, lying tongues, "Sloppy lips that drip to chin." The refrain returns, and the camera narrows to a single mouth: "This mouth / This I kiss." Then the grammar breaks into a rush of adjectives and participles, and the poem stops cataloguing and starts acting out what it describes.
Sound does much of the work. There is no regular meter, only short, heavily stressed lines that land like a pulse, and the repeated "that" at the start of line after line works as a drumbeat. Rhyme comes and goes in clusters: fade and away, lie and try, chin and skin. The longest run, "same," "lame," "pain," "rain," "days," arrives in the third wave and gives that passage a chant-like momentum. Elsewhere the poem goes for texture over tidiness. "Slurp and gulp and breathe / And pulse" is almost onomatopoeic, and the stacked *and*s make the reader run out of breath along with the speaker. "Lap and lick / And sap and sip" is a small tangle of l's, s's and p's, as wet to say as it is to picture.
The imagery is deliberately unglamorous. The most striking example is the "Mouth declaring loyalties / Between bites of meats / With salad leaves between teeth." A vow of faithfulness is made by a mouth that is also eating lunch, and the comedy keeps the poem from sentimentality. The same mouth "preys upon the weak and lame" but also "opens wide to drink the rain" and "sings, throat full, of future's days." The poem never resolves these contradictions. It asks the reader to accept that the person who is cruel and the person who is hopeful share one mouth, and that love means kissing both. Using the mouth to stand for the whole person is what lets the poem do this so compactly.
The fourth wave is the most feverish. "Cold to heat / Numb to fire / Dumb to slapped" reads as a rapid series of transformations, from silence to being struck awake. Then come the paired participles: "Gnashing gritting / Chewing smiting / Grinning growling / Sultry scowling." Teeth and aggression crowd into the language of tenderness until kiss and fight are hard to tell apart. The phrase "Harnessed rampant fields of frowning" holds the same tension in miniature, since something wild is being held in check. Then the poem exhales. "Smile unchallenged / Dreams undoubting" slows the pace, and the soft s-sounds of "Sounds slip softly to my ears / Whisper whisper lovely dear" feel like a hush after noise.
The ending carries the real turn. Until now the speaker has been the one kissing: "I kiss." In the last line the voice flips to "Kiss me sweetly till I'm dead," and the giver becomes the receiver. The closing couplet is also the poem's tidiest, with "reds" and "dead" chiming and "dear" and "ears" echoing each other. After so much that is ragged, the song-like ending feels earned. "Cherry reds" is the only conventionally pretty image in the whole poem, and it arrives only after the speaker has accepted everything unlovely. The word "dead" also loops back to the first line's "Lips that fade" and "melt away." The poem begins with bodies decaying and ends with a wish to die inside a kiss. Whether that wish is lovers' hyperbole or something darker is left open, and that ambiguity is part of the poem's pull.
What makes "Kiss" worth reading is its refusal to idealise. It lets the body be messy, the mouth morally mixed and desire a little frightening, and it still arrives at tenderness. The sound-driven free verse makes the reader feel the kiss as well as understand it.