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There is an uncertain territory
between night and day.
It is neither light nor shadow:

persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,
excavating tunnels, drilling silences,
insisting, running under my pillow,

The tide covers, discovers, recovers, and always walks in the nude.

The tide weaves and unweaves, embraces and separates, is never the same and 
never another.

The tide, sculptor of forms that last as long as their surge.

Temples look like discarded alphabets.
We loved lying in their shadows lazily
deciphering and resting and laying bets

All my girlfriends were talking about sex
and the vibrators they ordered from “Eve’s
Garden” which came with genital portraits

It doesn’t speak and it isn’t schooled, 
like a small foetal animal with wettened fur. 
It is the blind instinct for life unruled, 

Sweat lingering in broadcloth over soap,
the first man’s smell I smelled belonged to you.
Couldn’t look at myself. I trust you saw my taupe

All my life I’ve had goals to go after, goals
in a molten distance. And just the way snows
in the distance, dense and white among groves

I try to keep the promises I make
—for each one broken breaks the world—and seem
inhuman: no crack, no fissure, no mistake.

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—