Say that apparitional fish scuttled onto land for ages.
Say black-and-white nuclei called to technicolor ones.
Say the clockface of stars was polygamous as it married 
forever to hominids redacting the beating hearts of fields,
first eagles effacing euphoric light above the rogue empire. 

A short history of living and dying on Planet Earth involves 
the Greek chorus of showgirls at the grand buffet lunch bar
in Las Vegas McCarran International and a voice or voices
reconciling a coin of truth about the soul’s pornographies.
Somewhere down the crazy river an ephemera surfaces

and flows past as doom. Hopelessness. The wreck
of the world says that we thought we were deathless.
The showgirls have surgeries to pay off. Nonetheless,
the catch of the day in the lunch bar has been thawed 
and frozen and thawed until they’re stupid to trust it.

I read somewhere cells aspire: engines of longing.
I don’t know about that, but maybe rivers are maps
so showgirls have a sense of direction as the miles 
on other runways roll by and choreograph routines
suggestive of streams under a plumage of cloud.