Difficult heaven — a drop of rain — slides down the window held up only by friction, the buoyancy of earth-air. My beloved has a difficult heaven in her thighs and I am the window holding her up for as long as I can. Soon she will be one with the dew, one with the water running rivulets down houses and streets to streams. Soon she will be one with the ocean, crashing down and flattening out to a long streaming run up a beach. She and I keep afloat a difficult heaven by much heavy breathing, by many big words and miraculous acts. I can hold up the sea on the tip of my tongue. I can pierce through a globe of dew and see a whole world come apart with a groan, everything sliding in its flat wash, wild, up a smooth beach. We are careening jugs, great urns of oil being spilled. We are jewels and barley scattered in the tide where gulls pick at us in a frenzy, gone and gone with our legs kicking up. See how the rippling separates the sunset into a thousand flames? Well we are like that — life flows in and casts our light into days and days, our arms upraised, our bodies tributaries to it — reflections that must dance on the tide awhile before they’re drawn back into the lap of time.