By the Banks of the Daintree River
North Queensland, Australia

Crocodilus, as in
it might sense your shadow, or, worse,
the flesh of you. It might
pull the enormous stone of itself
out of the brown waters
into the flash of air; jaw you,
roll you down, drown you
without contest.

You, who never thought
you would “go out” this way,
to be snouted deep into a river’s
rocks and branches and silty leafage,
fed on for days.
To be nothing

but fodder, you, who believed in science,
progress, your body
below the sterilized implements of medical students;
you who signed the donor card,
imagining your heart somewhere
still beating; even you
who wished to be tucked in the earth
like a root vegetable, to leave
seepage and grass.

Not these bones—
monkey? fawn? boy? —
clanking together like rocks in the shaker of tide.
Who would have guessed
they would give you up so easily—
your loves, your questions,
even your most delicate stance,
like a pied stilt in low water.

Wisdom Sit not at all with another man's wife nor sit down with her
in thine arms, and spend not thy money with her at the wine;
lest thine heart incline unto her, and so through thy desire
thou fall into destruction. —Sirach (Apocrypha), 9

The prophets never imagined me
as audience for their sage advice,
though they might have dreamed
me as the wife whose innocent charm
could lure a weakened specimen,
foolish man, to sit or dine or sit on
top of, as I’d like to do to you—
wrap my arms about your neck
and learn your lips, and self-destruct
upon your lap. We need no Father
from the past to tell us how to come
undone like Babylon amid its walls
and hanging gardens. Nothing lasts.