Encantado [for the vernal equinox, zero tilt]

[Inia is the Guarayo Indian word for "dolphin"; the species, geoffrensis, is named for Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who plundered the first zoological specimens from Portugal for Napoleon Bonaparte.]

I repeatedly tasted a dozen of your riverbank footprints with my beak, the dark vines of water
Backcreeping. I reimagine grabbing your arm as I snorkeled up from the floodplain's mirror.
You are traveling in burnished water, in a burnt-out canoe caught in the trees--you were struck

By my pinkness lingering there, the cured color of half a pig's head in saltpeter and pepper.

Backcreeping a coagulated paste of hot pepper that is memory, with minglings of broken mirrors,
I contemplate your face, and I see myself again as a hunched figure in the afternoon, sweat-pasted

With sunburn, where I finally planted my knees. I tell you, the final floating minutes after a pilot exits

Are the few moments of his most important year, where his ankles live on as a scrolling fern in shale.

Avoiding the river taxis, and the questions shot through water of my past, I was a sunburnt, sweat-pasted
Girl, before my arch from shore. I awoke as a rubbery buoy with fins, not grey, like uncut stones still waiting
For their chance at life in a pet cemetery—Racing the water columns over the weathering shales

—Distributing echoes in an estuary, unlike the others, those spitting stagnant water in pipe-fitted fountains.

Girl, your arch reflection from shore, I could wake in. Without the submerged kill routine, the waiting line--
Just as all the others, in their eddies and orbits that strike you, traveling in burnished water in a canoe,
I question toppling. Quite similar to the others—consumed spitting the same in their stagnant fountains,
Your answer's wading in, by the end of it,
_________________________________your riverbank footprints melt into the dark vines of water.