Io

Io.

I've never understood how to circumnavigate the Gods,
how to lay in their lashes of skirts -- all belly.

I'd go rippling pale upon wide mouths of infinite blue. Your eyes were that blue when howling at stars.

I think of them when luminous, shivering, ending,
the ache of which, I'm told, may be measured on an app.

I paint the maplines of your face,
without seeing it sometimes.

It's become faded from view like the Muses who sing
to cold riverbeds, colder still for their lack of slashed gills.

Each one is plastic polluted, mere gashes that sting
when they spill their contortions upon bright, summered wheat rows.

Last Sunday we saw the twin Moons just arriving,
slithering the wind and disappearing again.

You know, I'd kayak the black hole of your heart to refind them,
as I believe only you could swallow them whole.

And when I die my small death, in a single in the city,
I'll blow smoke from the window. Imagine those rings.

We'd have wed on a boat on the slick, salt-fed Nile
and never again would have sedated alone.