Phoebe Nilsen

Without a Kiss Phoebe Nilsen

The poems in Without a Kiss tell the story of innocence and young love that is communicated without words or touch, and is very clearly felt by both though neither ever has unquestionable knowledge or assurance of the other's love because there was no expressive loving touch, no kiss, no embrace, and those simple, longed for words--the three missing words--are never uttered.

It is the girl's first date, and she doesn't even know she is dating, until her friend makes it clear that he is. Dating did not exist in her country or culture. And though she has secretly loved her travelling companion for some time, she thinks she is just travelling in Italy with a friend during a school break.

The experience has an unforgettable, haunting effect on her. Unaccustomed to flirting and considering it cheap and undignified, she is unable to pick up on his pretexts for touching her or to encourage him. He too is possibly inexperienced and needs encouragement, a nudge to help him along. While she is almost certain of his feelings for her, she has no concrete evidence. He has not said that he is fond of her. Instead of flirting and encouraging him, she buries her longings when the relationship does not develop further and tries to understand what happened and why they were unable to express their feelings.

Decades later, when it is too late to do anything about those feelings, they meet again as mature adults who are able to talk casually about their lives and about what happened or did not happen between them. They realize that many factors were involved in preventing their connection from flourishing: innocence and inexperience; cultural gaps/concepts of propriety and impropriety regarding the expression of affection between young men and women; ethnic prejudice and fear of reactions to and consequences of such ethnically mixed relationships; the power of sexual feelings in the inexperienced and the fear of losing control or overstepping boundaries, as well as the fear of being trapped into commitment at too young an age when the goals of education and success are most prominent.

All these issues surface or are hinted at in the meditational poems in this collection, as the female character indulges in nostalgic emotional archaeology, trying to figure out what happened. The poems reveal her attempts at reconstructing events as an archaeologist would piece together bone or pottery fragments, putting the pieces together to figure out what happened, what did not happen and why. She tries to find out how and why a kiss that was so deeply longed for by both characters never happened, and how something that never happened could have such a haunting and undying impact, perhaps even more than what actually happened.

Very loosely, the poems tell that story, and readers will also have to put the pieces together to come up with their version of the story as they too are reminded of their own personal experiences and the impact of what never happened in their lives, their equivalent of that much longed for, never shared kiss.