For him, in the beginning,
the stars were not networked
until by neural mesh.
“To procreate is to philosophize,” he said.
“Urged by stings of burdened insects
that arrived heavy with fecundity."
Image of her on hands and knees,
nipples erect, untouched, unpleased.
For her, in the beginning,
the world was wilderness & wonder,
deserving awe not conquest.
He distracted her from rainforest flower drawings
that glowed symmetrical & flowing.
“Ideologue,” she told him.
“No more guided than the flight of a fly into this lobster shell."
A shell lay at her feet, bleached,
oddly lit by the shimmering Pacific.
She let the sand, dark as his hair,
between her toes seep
& saw that he was stamen stiff.
“The flight of a fly grows more perfect
as I learn its way of the world,” he tried.
Stared at the shell.
But her Willapa Bay of mouth,
her Grays Harbor of waist
were countervailing currents
he could not turn aside.
Two All Souls Sermons,
contrapuntal to solitude,
counterbalance to emptiness
& the bondage of wilderness,
were private refrains, private reckonings.
Theirs was the opposition that succeeds attraction,
the disturbing wisdom after climax,
by happenstance delivered in this temporality,
this pulpit-square of Kalaloch Beach
to each other’s whole congregation,
deserving the holiest of disbelief,
Unto thee, God singing, praise be
to rough sea-surf & black sand,
to penultimate exultation
of gender & germination
on the highest, of the highest
illuminations of her splendid face,
illuminations of his dark & ruminating skin.
Unmerged, unreconciled,
they fuck, refract,
spin myth, science, song,
fly grandly out
across the waves toward Japan
riding the West Wind Drift
so as always to be watched
in sacred fascination by the other.
12 AUG 2003