—but unwelcome, the Pacific barges
into private spaces, like the many voices
of your mother while you’re making love.
How the waves under which I entered you
enter harder the holy homes of our good kin—
waste away our neighbors’ wealth, however
makeshift—and their hearts—and televisions
pieced together, restaurants, homes of driftwood
stilts and corrugated steel. Gone their photographs
of baptisms: children, adolescents, everyone more
underwater now than they ever would have been.
We make ice melt.
Seas rise, and still we seek
the ocean.
We make love in it.
Come together, perhaps
conceive—as the bricks and mortar of entire
towns get washed
away.