Something keeps tickling me.
Something unhelpful, vestigial, no
longer living,
but nevertheless
beguiling, being so perfectly
preserved in time's mellow amber:
this frail ancient
wisp of me that never
stopped loving her. But it's
not so much the artifact
and how its becalming beauty is all
bound-up in its hopelessness
as the accompanying
sense in which—all life on earth, right
up to this moment,
might have unfolded
purely as a reaction—to the littlest
inopportune encounter.
