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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunn
Stephen Dunn was born in New York City in 1939. He earned a B.A. in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University....
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Love
A Birthday
by Christina Rossetti
A Ditty
by Sir Philip Sidney
A Line-storm Song
by Robert Frost
A Negro Love Song
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
I loved you first... (from Monna Innominata)
by Christina Rossetti
I wish I could remember... (from Monna Innominata)
by Christina Rossetti
In a Boat
by D.H. Lawrence
Love
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Love
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Love in a Life
by Robert Browning
Love's Philosophy
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lovers' Infiniteness
by John Donne
Meeting at Night
by Robert Browning
No, Love Is Not Dead
by Robert Desnos
She Walks in Beauty
by George Gordon Byron
The Buried Life
by Matthew Arnold
The Definition of Love
by Andrew Marvell
The Look
by Sara Teasdale
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
by Christopher Marlowe
The White Rose
by John Boyle O'Reilly
To Anthea Who May Command Him Any Thing
by Robert Herrick
Wooing Song
by Giles Fletcher
Poems About Weddings
A Slice of Wedding Cake
by Robert Graves
Chateau If
by Peter Gizzi
Epithalamium
by Matthew Rohrer
The First Marriage
by Peter Meinke
To My Dear and Loving Husband
by Anne Bradstreet
To Sylvia, To Wed
by Robert Herrick
When a Woman Loves a Man
by David Lehman
Related Prose
Be Mine: Poems for Valentines
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The Kiss  
by Stephen Dunn

She pressed her lips to mind.
	—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.



"The Kiss," from Everything Else in the World by Stephen Dunn. Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Dunn. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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