Conduct of Our Loves

If the Angler fish can find a female
he attaches his jaws to her genitals:
their blood-systems unite,

his heart withers, and he degenerates into
a pulsing bag of sperm, fertilizing her
unto death. Still she swims through the vaults

of black waters, her angler glowing
from its forehead stalk of flesh: a Diogenes
barrelled by her mate
and her young, prowling in God's hunger . . .

"Conduct of Our Loves" first appeared in Ploughshares, vol. 18, no. 4