Because it’s instinct
to bring a small gift
when you visit
I want to leave oranges for the chimpanzees
in the zoo’s primate house

But not really oranges
and not people things
Mysterious, monkey-right things
Out of some indebtedness

Same thing for the lions
who don’t get to silence
live things between their teeth

Or maybe it’s an unromantic
overwhelming awe
which demands action:
unpacking my human mind
laying it out on a broad stone
letting my name drop
to the nowhere it came from
so I am again a verb: lovestruck

As in dreams when ribs
open out like gates
innards rushed by light

If there’s no right commodity
to give monkeys
instead should I step small?
Is being gone a gift?

But there is this urge
to mirror back each grace
         (and matter is our vehicle for gesture (for example,
          a bouquet presented to a girl — the flowers themselves,
          before being cut just movement; heads
          flushed and rotating to the earth’s turn))

Below the barter that keeps our maps
pinned down and agreed upon
it is very likely 

that we are loved intimately and impersonally
down to the moving cell-grain
by a centripetal force
that has no stake in maintaining
our current plans and bodies
but waits for us, a broad and intractable net

This desire to give concrete offerings
to water, color, armories of trees
is more than  a trading desire

Cut a slice of love from the air at your left
and eat it