To Find A Kiss Of Yours - Analysis

A love poem written as a bargaining spell

The poem keeps asking what would I give, but it never lands on a stable answer, because the speaker isn’t really negotiating with another person so much as with loss itself. Each desire—To find a kiss, To gaze, And to kiss—is framed like an offering to a god or an oracle. The central claim the poem makes, through that repeated question, is bleak and urgent: the beloved’s body has become something the speaker can only approach through sacrifice, and even sacrifice may not restore what’s gone.

The first kiss: desire already dead to love

The opening image is not a living kiss exchanged in the present, but A kiss that strayed and is now dead to love. That phrase twists the expected sweetness of kissing into a kind of emotional corpse—affection detached from the person who gave it, wandering and ruined. Immediately after, the speaker’s own mouth turns earthy: My lips taste the dirt of shadows. This is one of the poem’s sharpest contradictions: a kiss should taste like warmth, skin, breath; instead, the mouth tastes like darkness made physical. The tone here is hungry, but also disgusted and grieving, as if longing has begun to rot.

Dark eyes and a cosmic payment that fails

When the poem moves from lips to eyes, the scale expands from mouth and dirt to heaven and gemstones: Dawns of rainbow garnet before God. The speaker imagines paying with dawns—plural, lavish—like pouring out mornings in exchange for one look. But the poem refuses the fantasy. The next line slams down a new fact: The stars blinded them one morning in May. Suddenly the beloved’s eyes aren’t merely dark; they have been damaged by something vast and indifferent. Stars, normally lovers’ witnesses, become agents of harm. The tenderness of one morning in May—a time that should suggest spring—makes the violence feel even more shocking, as if beauty itself has turned against the beloved.

The body turns from holy to mineral

In the final desire—to kiss your pure thighs—the poem becomes more intimate, but not gentler. The thighs are called pure, yet what the speaker offers in exchange is harshly physical: Raw rose crystal, sediment of the sun. The beloved’s body is approached through minerals and deposits, things formed by pressure and time. That choice matters: instead of flowers or perfume, we get crystal and sediment, as though the speaker is trying to reach the beloved through layers that have hardened. The language suggests that eros, in this poem, isn’t soft; it’s geological—built of longing that has compacted into something sharp enough to cut.

The poem’s turn: from wanting to mourning

Although the speaker keeps asking what would I give, the emotional movement is away from possibility. The key turn is the line about blinding: after fanning open before God, the poem admits a catastrophe that no offering can undo. From there, even the final image of the thighs—closest to fulfillment—feels unreachable, because the payment has become elemental rather than human. The tone shifts from pleading to something like stunned reverence, the kind you feel at a shrine you can’t enter.

A sharpened question the poem leaves hanging

If the kiss is already dead to love, what exactly is the speaker trying to buy back: the beloved, or the speaker’s own ability to feel alive? The dirt of shadows on the lips suggests the speaker is being changed—so the offering may not be generosity at all, but a desperate attempt to escape contamination by touching pure skin again.

What the repeated offering finally reveals

By the end, the poem has made desire look like an act of worship performed in a ruined world. The speaker keeps naming body parts—lips, eyes, thighs—as if cataloging what remains sacred, while the cosmos (stars, dawns, God, sun) keeps intruding, making that intimacy feel both exalted and impossible. The tension between the beloved’s purity and the speaker’s shadow-taste doesn’t resolve; it’s the poem’s engine. What the speaker would give, the poem implies, is not just precious objects or radiant mornings, but their entire sense of ordinary reality—because without that kiss, reality has already darkened into sediment.