The Photographer

If you want to stir an ocean,
I suggest you begin with dust.
If you want to break the order,
the clouds,
and us.
I suggest you begin with the gentleness.
I suggest you begin with the brush.

Later when the moon is fuller than a virgin’s touch,
please introduce the lunacy.
Bend the spines of your crippled clumps of clay.
Like models of your own anatomy,
all their colors run from you in the rain.

There I stood deflated,
a coffee bean clenched between my teeth.
You were clutching a bottle of Stoli,
over the earth you fashioned from paper-mâché.
Then you lit a candle;
And then you sipped my drink;
Then you watched your world burn—
with a camera on your cheek.