This is the morning for sleeping, she said, quietly
(and with a mouth full of teeth). Immediately after
saying it, of course, she did, although her eyes remained

open. If you’ve ever slept with a woman who never closes
her eyes you know just how off-putting this can be.
If you have ever loved her you know it is possible

to overcome any physical defect, and eventually grow
to love the fault as well. Eventually the faults become
the person. Inseparable. Entwined. Tangled

like a couple of seabirds in six ring plastic bondage;
which is exactly how we were together, rough skin though she may
have had, and all those teeth. I watched her

sleeping there, all the same, the whole while working her lips
around her great rows of teeth, never quite managing
to hide them all. Needless to say I never asked

for a blowjob, and fortunately she never offered.
For love, it seems, we are willing to make
the gravest of sacrifices. For me, she gave up the ocean,

but was disgusted when I suggested vegetarianism.
I asked her once if animals dream, and she just glared at me
before rolling over in bed. She my be older than me by a couple

of million years, and therefore wiser, but I think I’ve got
her beat in wit. I found my answer watching the dog,
when we still had one. After it disappeared, I couldn’t help

but notice how eager she was to get another one. But can you
really blame her, my creature of the blue depths, who
knows the belly of the earth and its phosphorescent secrets,

my carcharhiniform tigress, my requiem, my aptly
named milk shark. And despite the mouth that owns her face,
despite the wide set eyes that seem to look everywhere at once

all pupils and glare, all cold blooded inquiry, how beautiful she
was, this sleek bodied lover, voracious, insatiable,
able to give and to take at the same time. And she did give,

she gave and gave from the beginning of time, throwing herself
at us, offering up her body again and again (those pornographic
photos of her, upsidedown sprawling her grin of teeth)

we have eaten of her again and again and now she is gone,
not to the depths from which she came, but to the walls of our
institutions, she now graces the ceilings of our museums

and I love her for it, in dying she has saved us all
from a cancer worse than her own (ourselves)) in her great act
of disappearance she has taught us the value of remaining:

and so I have promised to keep her body, to love it
as I have loved her, all unblinking eyes and teeth,
now unmoving, quiescent in the eternal grin of love returned.