...as it did once on a South Seas island,
a strip of black sand, plumeria in bloom . . .

Love, if the gods forgot, might have invented
those flowers' lush, hypnotic say, spice grains
of fragrance infiltrating the seaspray

sent aloft as waves stumbled on relics
of geologic insurrection. Eerie
how, after abrupt cones of lava rose....