Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in.
                    —Seidenberg¹

                    i.

Spreading our ashes over a
volcano, my smile leaves wrinkles
of a shadow, in humid un-

dress the heaven’s ark of your back
lowers to collect the last tears
of love left by my hand before

I ran off, devil’s sealing wax
adrift on a raft damp with lives
damned like the narrow eyes of bent

needles, always needing to be
filled to mend these holes a faithless
torrent of sweating men’s needs have

opened, spilling galaxies of
victims seeding star-lit shallows
doves circle by way of caution,

birds afoul of how many cocks
before them seeking peace there, found
nothing, in this depression I

have not buried but laid something,
a fragment of a wreck partial
to certain monumentalism,

                    ii.

I’ve a burning urge to drink out-
side the bush, to be nourished by
that box from which lovers lunch and

launch that starving barge we call us
and struggle to live on, so we
jump off, sinking its teeth of oars

in impossible deluge be-
fore ordering more force from the
storm, taking on with bardic and

Odyssean arms its thunder
of alarm foaming jaws from their
calm, a fable framing us in

foreign shores our lost hearts’ native
narratives know no more, ends of
earth oceans of lines rub the wrong

way, borders of lips licking thick
inhibition from their kisses
whisper nothing as together

we discover no difference
between this consummation and
cannibalism devouring us.

__________
¹Robert Seidenberg, “Marriage, Motives, and Mixtures” in Marriage in Life and Literature, published at New York by Philosophical Library in 1970; page 32.