SLUGS MATING
With their slowness, they are tunneling
into each other, moving together
where no movement is,
into nothing at all, eyes everywhere.
Soaked through, glisten and sheen,
they inhabit a time all their own,
in which clouds reel past like horses or trains,
the world around them a soundless
babble pitch, in which they hear
only each other, only the yellow.
The full lengths of their bodies
are like the full lengths
of the world, pressed together
like New York’s Empire State
Building rubbing against the marble
statues of Tiananmen Square,
and each of 68.4 billion stars
slowly sliding over the bald pate
of the man with the pretzel in the park.
They are like the lives of two people
touching from beginning to end:
the porcelain sink of her crying
in the grade school bathroom
rubbing against the sycamore leaves
of his last walk downtown.
Originally published in Crab Orchard Review.