Jin Zhu, Spilled Fruit (photograph)
III.
If love is a measure
of proximity, of limbs
yoked in sleep,
the inability to discern
whose socks are whose
when folding the wash,
we must learn to love
even the lint.
Consider the t-shirts:
things have a way of becoming
thinner with time,
spreading out and accumulating
elsewhere. There is
a theory that goes like this:
Death is alien to existence,
a result of the four elements
in the body wanting to separate
and return to their natural layers.
Death is a pulling apart.
What I wouldn't give to reconstruct
those oysters, so many
halves caught up in my hands.