With the greatest love we invented this world
together and presented ourselves to one another.

Her breast caught in late afternoon
a few yards off
after a tour through men’s eyes,
after goldfish enchant her child,
sparkles with rhinestones
and the butterfly across her blouse.
She knows what madness chugs through our lives.
She whisks the tremendous Nazca monkey,
mourns the devastated spider,
walks the hummingbird’s outline,
she imagines towers along the swift Peruvian road,
turrets to view antediluvian airstrips.

A man, archaeologist,
redraws the figures of a Nahuatl temple
before the stone goes for courtyards or seawalls,
another taps his ash
and the oilspills begin,
crowds of seabirds collect at the Greyhound station
in crates, dying of love and crime and romance
they burn like children clogged
with asbestos or covered with flies.

The sun sucked from the thermal core
plants rheumatism and cancer
where the universe hangs by baling wire
and a sailor steps down the gangplank
unbuggered and feared
as though there were stars left,
as though sponges were telephones.

The loved one is hauled from the water,
shot dead and scattered over the moon.