4. When All of Us Are Tossed


When all of us are tossed into the water, minute,
within us sympathy unsatisfied, crushing waves,
seawater blood, the unaccountable moon swelling
toward retribution, flood tide enlisting,
ebb tide the sand revealing--resisting,
the crack of waves, waves into grains--

Our search will not be over.
We find again and again the dead,
and they do not end. My part will only
shift sides, as someone nameless to me
tracks through the broken towns of my death,
clears my body and the fallen trees,
and counts.

When all of our cities are tossed into the water
we will still circle--our whole globe, liquid, drowning--
and hurtle tiny, recycled through the relentless stellar systems.

Swift-swimming, less than a grain in size, millions of our earths
rush courageous into the atom-collapsing towers
of the sun and still do not match what it boils--hundreds of
millions of suns file what swallows into the throat of the black hole
spidered center in our galaxy, and it sends
looped in numberless galaxies expanding,
infinity fusing into void.

When I find a corpse, I retrieve it.

You cannot hear me, mote, mirror looking to me headlong desire
between us the drowned in endless reflections,
the fallen, the crushed, the burned, the bombed, the shot,
trampled, chewed by dogs,

make this decision, then between us, how you will live
and satisfied watch it collapse into waves.

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