You said our love was as impossible
as sunflowers on Mars and left
me under a sleeping, purple sky.
I was terminally awake, a doomed
butterfly having just taken flight
under a poisoned, pretty dome.

Dying but determined,
I forced myself to the red planet,
ignoring the titled passage of years,
and settled onto the burned soil,
tasting it with my tongue.

I surveyed the copper hills
and sienna canyons,
but there were no flowers,
no Martian seedlings or new blooms--
nothing but blasted, irradiated ruin.

I drifted back toward Earth,
buffeted by indifferent solar winds,
no music of the spheres to comfort me.
I gave up somewhere in the stratosphere.

By the time I connected with the ground,
I was nothing more than a cosmic ghost
watching my body disintegrate, its pieces
as scattered and hopeless as Osiris.

I knew no one would gather my parts,
cradle them, and do their supernatural best
to breathe and mold me back to life,
least of all you, ignorant as always to
the astronomy of need, the gravity of pain.