seems a matter of dumb luck,
our bodies studded with these jewels of tenderness

the way so many dying insects 
bead the spider's web--

even now, on the cliffs above the beach,
I see two men who meet for pleasure,

nothing else,
fully clothed, in a cove of bushes,

standing face to face, as if to dance --
but one has both hands on the other's cock

and is pulling at it, tenderly --
and the body, at least, would name this Love,

and who are we to contradict
the pure animal body?

All around us, in expensive houses,
men and women married many years

touch far less joyfully than this,
with less attention to the hunger of it.

And truly, what do we have left 
but moments of this gazing, pulling

at each other, at ourselves, 
the shells ground finer and finer

under our feet, 
making a kind of jagged sand,

the insects we call Canadian Soldiers
rising from the water in great swarms

to mate and die--
on my window they looked like tadpoles,

hundreds of them flooding toward 
the light--

and some of them
made their way in,

the whiteness of the ceiling
became their water,

they massed there as full of joy
as if it were the sea.

By morning they were dead,
their many bodies

light and dry,
littering the tabletops.

And the spiders, lucky spiders
ate for weeks.