Conceptus

Your hand rests just below my navel
sensing perhaps.
This will be the last time I will see you like this;
in the world before. In a moment you will know
will begin to imagine the knob of flesh
the tracery of veins, a fossil's faint spine curved
into impossible questions.
To plant this kernel of yourself, to begin
this fusion, could there be a braver thing?

In the tannin-dark river, your legs
glimmered bronze, copper droplets dripped
from your hair and the ends of your fingers.
Warm scent of herbaceous skin, harking back to silt
your fingers lost in the thready moss, and now

your hand moves, dowsing, fingers tapping
a soundless code back to a time
before ears, voices, lungs.
Hammocked in his liquescent globe
cauled as a kidney, an ancient denizen
turns in the entirety of his world
waves webbed fingers