the elephant courts the millimeter
as if distance itself had grown a trunk
and learned to blush in fractions

the snail dreams the moon has already lost
and keeps the defeat folded in its shell
like a letter never mailed
his shoes are blanched and emptied
the color of a gelatin rifle
issued to a soldier who has not yet been born –

the eagle possesses the grammar of an inner vacancy
the way a mind owns the space it refuses to fill
his water is flecked with small arriving lights
the lion wears a clean and restless gothic mustache
his skin remains unhurried

he laughs the way an encore stains the air after the last note has already left
the crayfish holds the raspberry’s savage throat
the apple’s quiet calculation
the prune’s slow mercy
the pumpkin’s unashamed heat
the cow walks the parchment road
last animal in a ledger of meat
where every hair is weighted like a stone that remembers being alive
the snake leaps and pricks and pricks
circling the basin of love

where hearts hang pierced and still dripping
the butterfly, buttered in straw, becomes the butterfly the straw was always waiting to become
the same butterfly, buttered in straw, grows large
and is smothered, fathered, and put to bed inside the straw
the nightingale draws heart-stomachs out of gut-brains
which is only another way of saying
it lifts the lilies that roses hid
from the carnations that lilacs never admitted they were
the thumb keeps its right foot tucked behind its left ear
its left hand locked inside its right
standing on the left leg
while it vaults, again and again, over its own right ear
somewhere the millimeter is still listening
and the elephant has not yet decided whether love is a unit of measure
or the thing that refuses to be measured at all

— E.P. Robles