i can’t remember anything from the moment

i was born until the moment they died. it’s as if

i never really existed more than some creature left

indefinitely by the roadside until boyhood until

they died. so how can i

not write love poem after love poem to the people

i remember and to the people

i don’t? there are no heroes in my poems,

but if my love poems were to have heroes at all, i’d write

instead to the garden snail i once poked and prodded

in my box, whose body, glistening, had once

intensely entwined itself with another’s. as a boy,

i could not have known or believed

in this long and dangerous love-making,

in the fleshing of one thing to another, or

in the death of anything, of this snail, who,

in a blink, disappeared

into the blackness of a tire’s tread and whose slime,

in each slow orbit, made a trail for me to follow.

when i was a boy i looked at beautiful things as

if they were only beautiful

in the moment of my looking. this is why

i couldn’t believe in them. i was like a small scared god

in this way, burst into existence, imprisoned

in a warm and good grief and gladdened by

it. i cannot be the hero of my own love poems.

i live the way this animal died

a tiny, rapturous ocean stamped relentlessly

into its only meaning under the stars.

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