We were raptors, falcons, women clinging to one another and the earth, long toes curled about a brown limb in expectation or ecstasy, poised in the fecund air and awaiting the moist thump and the envelopment of flesh like water washing over, bloody but all vowel: elegant, elegiac, electric, easing into each other's embrace within the tinsel-spun hardened case of the pupa, angel hair trailing like ripples (your hair on my stomach raked in carefully combed waves, a zen garden tended by silent woman dragging the rattan claws over the sand like swirling gentle scratches).

In the blue pool below the falls, moaning.