Wine and Kissing

 Cherie Byrd www.kissingschool.com has a wonderful Kissing School in Seattle and has published the book Kissing School, Seven Lessons on Love, Lips, and Life Force ( I attended this class in April and would highly recommend it!) 

Cherie writes: “Lessons may be necessary, but remember that loving is essentially an art form and that your practice will largely be shaped by your willingness to be creative with what you are experiencing… There is so much untapped potential: the naked promise in a glance, the electricity in a touch, the delicious merging of a kiss.”   

Ojalá!

Elisabet

How She Felt

by Samuel Sullivan Cox

How she felt when first he kissed her – like a tub of roses swimming in honey, cologne, nutmeg and blackberries.

  by Byron

Away with your fictions of flimsy romance,

    Those tissues of falsehood which folly has wove!

Give me the mild beam of the soul-breathing glance,

    Or the rapture that swells on the first kiss of love!

Ye rhymers, whose bosoms with phantasy glow,

    Whose pastoral passions are made for the grove,

From what blest inspiration your sonnets would flow,

    Could you ever have tasted the first kiss of love!

If Apollo should e’er his assistance refuse,

    Or the Nine be disposed from your service to rove,

Invoke them no more; bid adieu to the muse,

    And try the effect of the first kiss of love.

I hate you, ye cold compositions of art;

    Though prudes may condemn me. and bigots reprove,

I court the effusions that spring from the heart

    Which throbs with delight at the first kiss of love.

Your shepherds, your flocks, those fantastical themes,

    Perhaps may amuse, yet they never can move:

Arcadia displays but a region of dreams:

    What are visions like these to the first kiss of love?

Oh! cease to affirm that man, since his birth,

    From Adam til now, has with wretchedness strove:

Some portion of Paradise still is on earth,

    And Eden revives in the first kiss of love.

When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past, –

    For years fleet away with the wings of the dove, –

The dearest remembrance will still be the last,

    Our sweetest memorial the first kiss of love.

  By Horace

When thou the rosy neck of Telephus,

The waxen arms of Telephus, art praising

Woe is me, Lydia, how my jealous heart

Swells with the anguish I would vainly smother!

Then in my mind though has no settled base,

To and fro shifts upon my cheek the color,

And tears that glide adown in stealth reveal

By what slow fires mine inmost self consumeth.

I burn, whether he quarrel o’er his wine,

Stain with a bruise dishonoring thy white shoulders,

Or whether my boy-rival on thy lips

Leave by a scar the mark of his rude kisses.

Hope not, if thou wouldst hearken unto me,

That one so little kind prove always constant;

Barbarous indeed, to wound sweet lips imbued

By Venus with a fifth part of her nectar.*

Thrice happy, ay, more than thrice happy, they

Whom one soft bond unbroken binds together;

Whose love serene from bickering and reproach

In life’s last moment find the first that severs.

*The ancients supposed that honey contained a tenth part of nectar, and therefore the lips of Lydia were imbued with double the nectar bestowed on honey.

e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
Your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Mi novio sent me the first lines of this poem today. I had read it for the first time about a year ago y me encanto. I loved to be reminded. There is no written mention of wine, but we can imagine a taste of wine that would go along with such a a poem.  What wine would you choose? Elisabet 

Wild Geese
Mary Oliver
 
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
Meanwile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Anonymous

There we were driving down the narrow little dirt road in the Anderson Valley, tall blackberry vines rising up on both sides of us. The road was not in the best of shape and I was concerned we were even in the right place. We had driven past it on Hwy 128 several times before we finally found the address on the mailbox. She had read about this place, Lazy Creek winery and this was supposed to be it.

Her name was Laverne. It was 1983 and we had been living together for a year now …known each other since 1969 when her twin sister, Lavone introduced us. Back then I was just 18. She was 19 and was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Her sister was tall at 6 foot and she was just an inch or two shorter with long legs, long dark hair and fair light skin. She walked with her shoulders back and her chest and small breasts out and she was beautiful. I was attending Sonoma State University then and she had been going to UC Berkeley …and she was very cool. I had one very large crush on her.

We became friends and I visited her out in Pocket Canyon many times where she lived in a renovated and converted bus parked under the redwoods next to an apple orchard. We would stay up and talk all night and sometimes I would spend the night but our relationship never developed into a sexual one. I was very shy …and she was way to cool. I had her on quite a pedestal.

She moved away from Northern California a year or two later and eventually got her masters degree from Arizona State in Archeology. We stayed in touch and it always made me smile when I found one of her letters in the mail. She would send me poetry …with pictures she had found cut out of magazines to go with the words. I loved getting her letters. She worked in archeology for several years until one day in 1982 she called to tell me that she couldn’t take it anymore …the living in small town motels in the middle of  nowhere. I flew to Tuscon and we packed her things into a U-Haul truck and drove back to Santa Rosa. We moved in together and became lovers …I’m not sure which happened first.

We would frequently return to the southwest where we explored Indian ruins. She was an archeologist had access to sites that most people did not even know about. It was very fun and I came to love the dessert and the southwest.

But here we were now driving down this little dirt road …not sure we were even in the right place. We came to a farmhouse with a barn and some out-buildings …and nothing that would indicate that we had found what we were looking for …no sign that said “Lazy Creek”. I knocked on the door but no one answered and I new this could not be the place. So we headed back out the way we came in when a few hundred yards down the road an old pickup truck came from the other direction. There was no room to pass so we backed all the way back to the farmhouse where I was sure we would have to explain to the man in the truck what we were doing there.

He climbed out of his truck with a smile and introduced himself as Hans Kobler, owner and winemaker of Lazy Creek …invited us to follow him to a building around behind the house where he opened a bottle of red wine and brought out some Gruyere cheese to have with it. We talked and he told us his story …he was Swiss and how he had just won an award for his wine …and how he came to buy the property there in the valley. I will always remember that glass of wine. It was the most interesting delicious wine I had ever tasted. It was a Pinot Noir and it became my favorite. I have been in love with it ever since.

Many years have passed and Laverne and I are still good friends …she is my oldest friend actually. We have both been married and divorced and through other relationships. We still commiserate, talk about our lives and we still occasionally get out to taste some wine together from time to time.

I have my own small vineyard now and have learned to make some of my own Pinot Noir …just enough for a couple of cases so far …and have recently meet someone very special. The other night we shared the very first bottle of my wine and our first kisses together. I will always remember the wine and her first kisses and how special they were to me that day …and how it made me remember the time I fell in love with Pinot Noir.

Sandra Cisneros

Dark wine reminds me of you,
The burgundies and cabernets.
The tang and thrum and hiss
That spiral like Egyptian silk,
Blood bit from a lip, black
Smoke from a cigarette.

Nights that swell like cork.
This night. A thousand.
Under a single lamplight.
In public or alone.
Very late or very early.
When I write my poems.

Something of you still taut
Still tugs still pulls,
A rope that trembled
Hummed between us.
Hummed, love, didn’t it.
Love, how it hummed.

Julia Child
At the wedding of Bumby Hemingway and Puck Whitlock “By the end of the afternoon, I was thoroughly marinated with strawberries and cherries, champagne, brandy, Monbazillac, Montrachet, and Calvados, and speckled by tidbits of grass.”

Two full moons in December. Did you find a kiss under one of them? Quiet, perfect, quiet…

Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, v. I.

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise —-

Although there is no mention of kissing, it is not a stretch of the imagination that Hafiz’s recommendation to hoard life’s subtleties might encompass the art of kissing along with the good wine.
Elisabet

By Hafiz

Now that I have raised the glass of pure wine to my lips,
The nightingale starts to sing!

Go to the librarian and ask for the book of this bird’s songs, and
Then go out into the desert. Do you really need college to read this book?

Break all your ties with people who profess to teach, and learn from the
Pure Bird. From Pole the news of those sitting in quiet solitude
is spreading.

On the front page of the newspaper, the alcoholic Chancellor of the University
Said, “Wine is illegal. It’s even worse than living off charity.”

It’s not important whether we drink Gallo or Mouton Cadet, drink up!
And be happy, for whatever our Winebringer brings is the essence of grace.

The stories of the greed and fantasies of all the so-called “wise ones”
Remind me of the mat-weavers who tell tourists that each strand is a
yarn of gold.

Hafiz says: The town’s forger of false coins is also president of the city bank.
So keep quiet, and hoard life’s subtleties. A good wine is kept for drinking,
never sold.