When Mutual of Omaha supported
nature shows, it spared us sex and gore.
We stared as peacocks preened and rhinos courted,

I sit in a body & think of a body, I picture
Burnens's hands, my words
make them move. I say. Plunge them, into the hive,

Maidenhair borders the upward trail,
trims the margin braided green
and lives here—thrives—in the dark
beneath these arches, in this

Kenneth noticed a man staring at breasts,
the way he, Kenneth, might look at an ass.
Kenneth felt a solidarity of need.

He remembered his body.
Thick thighs stood him shoulder high,
fists pounded out the one shape

I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass

Too late. The phone had stopped
ringing, but already the narrow bottle stood
on the table, the water in it reflecting
the rug on the floor as orange. Thinking

You have come to the edge in your T-shirt and tennis shoes,
the trail map snapping in the sudden wind, and there,

like nothing you had imagined, nothing

We missed the point: the red gash
of a hood was a door in the forest,
a mouth to the unknowable. We wanted

When the last girl came
to the pile of leaves, she chose
a green one for her mother, brown