^{“Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.”
        —”Quarantine,” Eavan Boland}

Which incidence of body shall I leave you?
Below the tallow sun, gannets eviscerate sea life
to sustain their sky life. Same thought courses
everyone’s morning,  death, please not today.

I soap off chinolas, holding the shore within sight.
You sweep the runny yolk under a bread crust.

I’ve slipped on a flouncy dress and lipsticked
though there’s no place we can go.
We whisk ourselves away from news
and practice breathing on mirrors.

I breathe into your nape and call it kissing.
You breathe out and out and out.

When needles consecrated our communion
with Brâncuşi’s “Kiss,” we didn’t know the artist
had sculpted the lovers’ embrace to shape
the letter M in  Moarte, Death.

If you’re to harvest the inked skin from my arm,
love, dry and stretch it in the Caribbean sun,

and as you parcel out the rest, remember
some for beetles, some for ravens,
a synecdoche of bones for my ancestral plot.
What’s left, under the rugged oak tree

to wait for you. Then we’ll embarrass them
one last time, bring that mouthful of earth to ecstasy.