We embrace like rough hot stone slid against rough hot stone,
The space between us vanishing, a horizon in lifting fog,
The back-and-forth sway of stomach in breath a ship that
Approaches then recedes from the dock,
Each approach staccato with the hum of two engines
Dying in our chests: put-put-put, they seek to anchor
In place the bobbing of our bodies and minds,
Synapses crossing boundaries and then connecting
Like the wick and the fuel, like dynamite erupting
In blood and eyeball and lip and thought.

We embrace as a piece of paper crushed,
The words flattened until unintelligible,
A brilliant essay lost in the incoherent illiteracy
Of the burning salt that surrounds us like a solar sea;
Had we the strength to avert our eyes from one another
We would see ourselves in the woods in which we were felled,
An ecosystem destroyed by industry and necessity and desire
That we together regrow with our pagan puritanical desire
To build, stone by stone, the foundations of a better world.

We embrace and then part with the rhythm of dancers
Destined by the choreography of love to reconnect,
A jostling jostled love that tames raw stone into a pliant material
That gives itself to a broader purpose;
O, we are the builder and the built, the wood and the mill,
And the seeds from which erupt plants, passion, justice,
And the longing for life itself to come into being, reproduce, and be better.