Their dream decelerates our spinning planet
one millimeter-per-second per century
until they have matched velocity with us

There is less and less difference
between your shadow
and the shadow inside you

I have lost my bachelorhood to hands I’ve made
grasp the fabric of my most famous couch.

The mosquitoes love it. So do the children who pull on their
   mothers’ skins
to indicate that there’s a naked man outside. So there will

They return in desirable colors of the season,
whether casually or stupidly, to simplify the garden
of its sweetest shoots and tips, though I have set out

The bread and the candle: pale leftovers
         from the last milling, the last box of singular suns.

This is worship, one could say, as pure as white
sheets in the sun, though there is no sun now.

Before I bathed him, the dirt was so dense
that for all it was a second, firmer skin.
Boys as we know them do not have second skins.

The female should always be secret, you said.
Women, like figs—rotten
when open.

But this is not the field the soldiers took with so few losses.
   Prophets never stop
beside the well sprung from the garden hose. A snake has