“Elephant Shit and Flowers” or “Everyone is a Great Poet”

Harry Owen, in “Five Books of Marriage,” tells the reader to pick up some dried elephant dung, roll it into a ball, and squeeze out on to you “flowers, pink, red, white.”

Elsewhere he conjures a “sudden hot/ seizure, a two-stroke scream.”

But, most of the book’s more like the following:

Fathoms

I love you he says
words trembling like moonlight
on the surface of the sea
his heart so deep
so dense, so clean
it knows everything
everything

nothing at all