"First Kiss" by Tim Seibles

This animation is part of our new series, "There's a Poem for That," which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life's biggest feelings.

Poem by Tim Seibles, directed by Hannah Jacobs.

First Kiss

Her mouth

fell into my mouth

like a summer snow, like a
5th season, like a fresh Eden,

like Eden when Eve made God

whimper with the liquid
tilt of her hips—

her kiss hurt like that—

I mean, it was as if she’d mixed
the sweat of an angel

with the taste of a tangerine,

I swear. My mouth
had been a helmet forever

greased with secrets, my mouth

a dead-end street a little bit
lit by teeth—my heart, a clam

slammed shut at the bottom of a dark,

but her mouth pulled up
like a baby-blue Cadillac

packed with canaries driven
by a toucan—I swear

those lips said bright
wings when we kissed, wild

and precise—as if she were
teaching a seahorse to speak—

her mouth so careful, chumming
the first vowel from my throat

until my brain was a piano
banged loud, hammered like that—

it was like, I swear her tongue
was Saturn’s 7th moon—

hot like that, hot
and cold and circling,

circling, turning me
into a glad planet—

sun on one side, night pouring

her slow hand over the other: one fire
flying the kite of another.

Her kiss, I swear—if the Great
Mother rushed open the moon

like a gift and you were there
to feel your shadow finally

unhooked from your wrist.

That’d be it, but even sweeter—

like a riot of peg-legged priests
on pogo-sticks, up and up,

this way and this, not
falling but on and on

like that, badly behaved

but holy—I swear! That
kiss: both lips utterly committed

to the world like a Peace Corps,

like a free store, forever and always

a new city—no locks, no walls, just
doors—like that, I swear,

like that.