Because Yosemite’ s high altitude lake’ s
tadpoles wash up in
glow-in-the-dark condoms
and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because
there’ s bird shit
in the clouds. Things catch, get caught.
Things are consumed.
There’ s no looking
back. And so you
were conceived here, Ezekiel, fifty
feet off the Trail of
Broken Ankles. We wanted
to make sure no one
would see. The one hiker
who saw looked away.
Amino acids
of the flushed cheek. Dirge
for eyeless things. I washed
my body in the river
and the river went numb —
the mind sunburned.
I imagine the second
before you took, before
the cells began to split,
before that flint
was struck, before the dna
began to twist,
that a colorless emptiness
suddenly inverted
and told the world that he, too,
once had a mother.
But there is no nest of leaves. Nothing
stops. The clock in the glacier
still ticks above us
and on our skin
there were enormous ants, the segments
of their bodies
like black droplets of paint
pushed very close against each other
but still not touching, yet
taking their work with them —
taking away their dirt world.