II
How like a virus entering a cell,
libertine, blasé, pollen-thighed,
you threw your coat aside
and pumped your salty cargo pell-mell
through my delicate biosphere.
In that tidal basin where life’s begun,
your twin orchids blazed like suns:
white heat eclipsing but to reappear.
And how I sculled through your mind-lagoons
(vetchy, radiant, thick with fauna),
regaled by egret-flight and japonica,
deadsummer, when in arctic rooms
time rode the floe of our imaginings,
and my heart beat faster for its clipped wings.