Meeting
by A. S. J. Tessimond
Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell,
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.
We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair; before the inept lips open.
Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely; skin unhappy …
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennae stretch … waver … and almost … touch.

A few random poems:
- Анатолий Жигулин – Кукует поздняя кукушка
- Study of an Elevation, In Indian Ink by Rudyard Kipling
- The Gardener X: Let Your Work Be, Bride by Rabindranath Tagore
- to_his_coy_mistress.html
- Иннокентий Анненский – Гораций
- Николай Глазков – А минувшее все непонятнее ребусов
- Владимир Маяковский – Проверь, товарищ, правильность факта
- To Robert Louis Stevenson poem – Alfred Austin
- Chorus of Youths and Virgins poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Storm and Sunlight by Siegfried Sassoon
- Child In Red by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Remembering An Account Executive
- Being Underwater by Sahiti Siddharth
- Mr. Mistoffelees by T. S. Eliot
- Альфред де Мюссе – Не забывай! Когда заря рассвета
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Hand Dark
- Granny
- Future Verdict
- Easter Decorations
- Dawnlight On The Sea
- Dawn
- Dawn God039s Sabbath
- Candle Lord
- By The Camp Fire
- By A Norfolk Broad
- Baptistry
- Aunt Dorothys Lecture
- At Sea
- At Long Last
- An Old Doll
- An Anniversary
- All Saints Day 1868
- All Saints Day 1867
- After Our Likeness
- A Story At Dusk
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works