Man shaped out of mud
And made to speak and love—
Let's stick in him a little whisperer,

A bucket with two holes.
Let's give him the Great Deceiver,
A blood-stone.

A church with a vaulted ceiling
Where the White and Blue Niles meet.
A dog who cries after dark.

Everyone has a heart,
Even the people who don't.
It floats up like a beached whale in the autopsy.

The heart has no sense of humor.
It offers itself piteously like a pair of handcuffs,
And is so clumsy that we turn away.

The past 
Is a quarryful of marble statues
With heads and genitals erased,

But the heart is a muscle made of sharkbone and mutters,
Resting place softened with hay
Where all the cows come home, finally.

Only seagulls surround us
balanced 
on their parameter of hunger,
and seals 
who in their soft-body swim 
roll onto the rocks 
to stretch their skin 
to infinite edges. 
They lie about 
like sleeping infants.
If there are sharks 
they swim beneath sight.
The water 
slides by undisturbed 
and the cold sun slips
through a seam in the clouds.
Persistent wind 
like a child's wailing
cramps our fingers
intertwined like nest twigs. 
The picnic, pocketed into parts,
will wait. 
We will be as those seals,
full-fat on ocean air 
and lying 
beneath the cloud shift
until the tidemark
measures the horizon
and our huddled bodies
take the shape of stones.