Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions

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That all at its essence is dove-gray.

Wipe the lipstick off the mouth of anything and there you will find dove-gray.

With my thumb I have smudged away the sky’s blue, and the water’s blue,

and found, when I kicked it with my shoe, even the sand at its essence is pelican-gray.

I am remembering Eden.

How everything swaggered with color.

How the hollyhocks finished each other’s sentences.

How I missed predatory animals and worrying about being eaten.

How I missed being eaten.

How the ocean and the continent are essentially love on a terrible mission to meet up with itself.

How even with the surface roiling, the depths are calmly nursing away at love.

That look the late nurser gets in its eyes as it sucks: a habitual, complacent peace.

How to mother that peace, to wean it, is a terrible career.

And to smudge beauty is to discover ugliness.

And to smudge ugliness is to be knocked back by splendor.

How every apple is the poison apple.

How rosy the skin. How sweet the flesh.

How to suck the apple’s poison is the one true meal, the invocation and the Last Supper.

How stillness nests at the base of wind’s spine.

How even gravestones buckle and swell with the tides.

And coffins are little wayward ships making their way toward love’s other shore.