• Didn’t you like the way the ants help
    the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
    Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
    sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
    in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
    baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
    Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
    from the estuary all the way up the river,
    the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
    the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
    Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
    clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
    Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
    eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
    What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
    at the end of a world whose sub-substance
    is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
    Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
    and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
    Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
    split open and the mayfly struggled free
    and flew and perched and then its own back
    broke open and the imago, the true adult,
    somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
    the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
    alimentary canal come to a stop,
    a day or hour left to find the desired one?
    Or when Casanova took up the platter
    of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
    out the window, telling his startled companion,
    “The perfected lover does not eat.”
    As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
    pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
    giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
    around the downward march of debris?
    Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
    what seemed your own inner blazonry
    flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
    Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
    hinged beings, and then their offspring,
    and then their offspring’s offspring, could
    navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
    to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
    by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
    who fell in this same migration a year ago?
    Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
    to wake in the night and find ourselves
    holding hands in our sleep?