I learned my way around your body
like a knife. The creases, the folds—
the ways we come apart. You showed me
myself, too, lying there prone.

In geometry, the golden spiral
is a logarithmic function
whose growth factor is ϕ.

In nature, I watch rivers
Fibonacci themselves
through airplane windows.
I pick up a seashell and our lives

cascade out. The sun, again,
the sun. I struggle, swallow
it all until one day

I’m storming away from you
into a coffee shop bathroom.
Inside, a torn map of America, its parts
on all four walls. Great, gutted squares

of Colorado and Wyoming float up at me,
dreams I’ve walked through.
Things seem so much to hang together;
sometimes I can see it in my sleep

for one ringing moment—
everything—

but then, I wake. The dishes, the dog.
It’s all in parts again.
A man on the street says
I have the prettiest legs. The man I want

won’t want me. They’re both wrong, maybe.
On the stairwell outside my apartment,
the shell I plucked off the beach sits, smells
too much of salt and flesh to bring inside,

though I’d pounded
the death out of it
on the deck.
Like the night you said, oh,

I can see now this won’t end well,
my body already an eon away
beside you in the bed.