How to make love to Sarah McLachlan


Even though Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
Would be a seventh grader by now
Having left the feathery white interior
China of Miss Mclachlan’s thighs over three
Presidential elections ago—finding itself
Now in the scratchy Homecoming glitter
Hallways of a Canadian junior high school
Its voice not able to hit the high note on the title
Track since puberty a slight peach goatee
Sprouting beneath its lower lip like a hive
And even though we have to listen to the album
Through my DVD player since the time
I inserted the burnt CD of my own
Father’s eulogy—reliving the testimonies
And hymns of a man whose spirit was yanked
From beneath him in a jaundiced hospitalized
Half-breath and how since that experience
No other compact disc seems to function
Without skipping a melodious pulse
In the pouting plastic jaw-line of my stereo—
And how after Guinness and Beamish
(Which you punned “Be Amish,”)
The empty cylinders of imported stout cans
Resembling vacant diminutive silos
Overturned in a breeze of conversation and laughter
Emanating from my back porch table
Before we adjourned inside
Our lips unbuttoning each other
Untying flesh from skin branches of limbs
The hushed neon blue of the television screen
Casting our shadow into one contiguous
Nylon mountain range over the Murphy bed
And the sound of Sarah McLachlan
A chimed stain glass echo resonating like a bell
Like the sound your body makes inside my body
A fumbling angel trying to inhale after a wayward
Quill delicately slipped past the hemline of her torso
Massaging the mysterious cross of her body
More holier than halo or wings
Reminding us that certain joys are forever
Beyond our possession, that your tongue and lips
Taste better than ice cream
And that when the morning June sun
Splashes ripples of orange light
Across the prayer shape of our bodies
There will be nothing left in this world to fear.