We are the shepherds of desire.

Low bell
not really ringing
so clear
so much as clunk
swinging
clunk again
tied to your neck
so I can find you
when you wander.

A fly buzzes you
never afraid,
you just amble
flicking an ear
back to pulling grass
distended humor
chew
foaming green between your crowded teeth.

This work is usually done alone
But we have found a way to feel
these fields
to be
together, even set apart
by an ocean of lost ice
weeping its way to saline shores
the slow violence
our forgotten fate
rendered from old choices
too linked to the pastoral
of a tiny home on
an empty island
which used to be ours.

We go on culling the
partisans of sense
telling them our electric tales
of an ethics
urbanized by the mesh
of our latent indulgences

A pretty barista
A lobster
An army of vacuuming ants
Piling crumbs near the mattress
Leaving quietly thorough a hole in the wall
Where the dead squirrel was found.

We are where we have always been
touching by underground wires
in pixels
the false approximation of flannel
I feel the terry cloth sound between my teeth
it hurts to swallow
that sound

Do they move together?
Tracing the countours of that hill
unable to see the world beyond this island
It was a gift.

Cleaved in two by a wolf
Distended
We had left them too long.
They are young.

And we
are the shepherds of desire.