I.

Half-ravished by the first light touch of sun
   on winter-languid skin, and air’s slow stir—
ardent, close—across bare limbs, we’ve come
   for potting soil, for silver-bladed trowels,
for the brightest daubs of color we can bear
away, pre-blossomed in black plastic flats
   of vinca, dianthus, pansies. Months too late
   to raise the tulips’ complex pulse, we praise
      instead the ready-made, until it takes
      the squat shape of this bastard child of Keats.

II.

Maybe we’ve come to this—all that remains,
   the pointless simulacrum of a choice:
white or green, it’s plastic either way,
   machine-stamped in the hollow shape of loss.
Or is this too much to make of a cardboard nest
   of two-part urns, bowls and bases packed
      as snug as bullets in a magazine,
   arranged for sale in monochromatic stacks,
the scraps of half-truth and cheap beauty rent
      to pieces by this dying century?

III.

The two of us are young enough to dream
   we’ll make it out alive, somehow escape
the burden of our genes and history
   to start again, unstained. From the rotting corpse
of a lion he’d killed, Samson took honey, ate,
   and found it sweet, but then slew thirty men
because of it. Like him, we crave the taste
      of something drawn from death, but can’t be sure
      if fingers drip with syrup or with gore.
   Or both. Nothing we touch is innocent.