The natural order of things dictates
that first we come close,
then we fall in love,
and then, categorically,
we begin to drift apart.
Things — they slip away at an angle
infallibly, entropy swallows us
entirely. Loves begin to slip
through the cellular membranes of life,
and what remains are the decayed proteins
of mundane existence,
inside the nucleus, the core,
encoded in deoxyribonucleic acid.
And thus, love is explained
in Gabriel’s universe:
a biochemical process of high beauty,
with an emotionally unstable half-life,
whose decay affects all vital functions —
his and others’.
And when it finally dies,
as things do die,
the capacity to write
molecular verses is reborn.
In this universe, there is experimental error,
systemic failures of the system,
the inevitability of drifting apart,
the entropy of affection,
the cellular death caused by a peptide aberration
between two once-complicit molecules.
And photons travel from the farthest stars,
and excite other molecules, and they draw near,
but in Gabriel, disadvantageous
mutations arise.
Natural selection eventually removes him,
and what remains are the others —
the more successful
randomnesses of this life.
The universe, reading the report,
signed the footnote in silence
and kept on spinning.