I could go out each day and pluck another tulip to replace this one,
carefully positioning it where you left the first without a thought,
the pile of golden corpses growing day by day in the alley behind my apartment—
a massacre in days apart.
I won’t be so violent in my devotions, trusting that
only the body decays, and not the traces
of your touch, where you rolled the sun-colored flesh between your fingertips.