Landscape Made From Egg and Sperm

Because Yosemite’s high altitude lake’s

             tadpoles wash up in

                         glow-in-the-dark condoms

             and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because

                             there’s bird shit

                             in the clouds. Things catch, get caught.

                                        Things are consumed.

                             There’s no looking

                                        back. And so you

                                        were conceived here, Ezekiel, fifty

                             feet off the Trail of

                        Broken Ankles. We wanted

                   to make sure no one

                              would see. The one hiker

                                         who saw looked away.

                                         Amino acids

                                         of the flushed cheek. Dirge

                                                   for eyeless things. I washed

                                                   my body in the river

                                                              and the river went numb—

                                                   the mind sunburned.

                                                   I imagine the second

                                                   before you took, before

                                                       the cells began to split,

                                                   before that flint

                                                   was struck, before the dna

                                                             began to twist,

                                        that a colorless emptiness

                           suddenly inverted

                   and told the world that he, too,

                                        once had a mother.

                                         But there is no nest of leaves. Nothing

                                         stops. The clock in the glacier

                                         still ticks above us

                              and on our skin

                   there were enormous ants, the segments

                               of their bodies  

                               like black droplets of paint

                                               pushed very close against each other

                                                      but still not touching, yet

                                                      taking their work with them—

                                                      taking away their dirt world.