Anthropology
Was it 40,000 years ago or only forty
when we learned to tilt our heads
so our noses would not keep our lips
from touching? But anyway before
that game of bobbing for apples floating
in a tub and our foreheads touched
or bumped, really, which was how
the thought of love got into my head.
And I still have the bony forehead welt,
like a sensor, sore if I press on it,
though that may have been
the corner of a bookshelf where I kept
my favorites—Eliot and Alcosser and Bly
—and hid the key to a diary with names
to help recall eye color and the shapes of lips
up close, droplets of water on the tips
of eyelashes and noses. Or tears, thanks be.
Daniel Lusk is the author of several collections of poetry and other books, most recently, The Shower Scene from Hamlet, poems, and The Vermeer Suite, art and poetry. Besides in Innisfree, individual poems will appear in 2021 issues of Gulf Coast, North American Review, Crosswinds, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod International Journal, Cloudbank, Stonecoast Review, The Orchards, and Live Encounters.