Jackson McCarthy
Three Mysteries
1.
Where did I go with you the night
that made my thought visible again —
where my hands traced you,
through your slow-moving hair
and over your eyes, closing them
into a mask of breathing death.
And your breath joined mine,
each quickening the other,
as thoughts of you entered me,
as though you weren’t with me,
even here as you lie atop me,
turning back again into the boy I know.
From the distance of memory,
there’s a fragrant moon diffusing
light over us, glowing our empties
into its luminous afterthought,
your sheets and skin
its crests and valleys.
And in each shadow it casts you changed,
made different somehow — and now,
once more before day breaks us,
it rouses me again to love,
whose pains pass over
your face, and into mine.
2.
You kissed me first on the rim
of the glass, then on my lips,
then somewhere further in thought
than I had asked you to.
And kissing you back,
my body and yours, holding you
in my hands, the small hours
take root in something earlier,
keening the past with what we’ve come to know.
And yet, like spring, desire goes on
ahead of us, twisting into new forms
which gesture toward you
even as they leave you
busy and spent beneath me. Speak
to break the silence — your leg curls up,
stocky and strong, and you smile
as though from some trembling distance:
your mind, privacy, which your body
changes so as to make
open and closed to me. Belief regulates
this awful leisure — your magnet heart
in your chest, like a weapon I use
as you move to leave
to will you to stay.
3.
Where are you now that you’re asleep,
watched by every human love
in the thickening night.
Noises from the city,
touches from my body
filter your dreams — the slightest twitch
lights on your senses, moves you
instinctively, closer to me.
We lie in each other’s embrace —
I’m still inside you, all around you,
knowing the known world
between the twin horns
of thought and action, love and sex.
Here we’re made one
only intermittently, in the chance
I catch a kiss of sleep, or you
a moment awake, joining me in vision
to see you as before — your standing form,
the naked room which frames you,
undresses you, gives your body to mine.
And your soft kind smell, a spell
that beckons sleep toward me,
and with it the coming day
where I’ve been walking endlessly, thinking of you.
Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His poetry has been published widely in local literary journals, including Best New Zealand Poems 2023, and he currently serves as an editor at both Symposia and Salient magazines. You can read more of his work here.
Jackson notes: ‘Each of the ‘Three Mysteries’ interpolates a line from another poet. In order of appearance, these are Louise Glück, Emily Dickinson, and W.H. Auden.’