I'm in love with the pollinator.

Far below, near the beach, the racket of explosives. The mercenaries--flack jackets and helmets, brandishing uzis. A landscape of shattered glass, battlements that were once foundations of dwellings. We're too high up to see, but we know what happens. Three of them come upon a fourth. One holds him at gunpoint, while the other two beat him with the butts of their rifles. When he's still, one examines his tags: turns out he's one of their own.

A bride, I step into the white nylon suit, gear that resembles the feathery chiffon of angels. The pollinator kisses the nape of my neck, then takes me by the hand up through the banana trees, their leaves like fans, past the sword leaves of the hala. The more we ascend the less dense flesh feels, our rising part hovering, part flight. Energy, like bubbles in champagne, bright little stings. My arms feel fluttery. We're growing wings.

Somewhere above us, the Ooallecia, gush of amaryllis orange. Blossom with sextet petals. In this heat they fall open by themselves. There are twelve Ooallecias left, and the pollinator knows where they are. He takes the place of the Divenet, that streak of blue that used to dip its beak into petaled throats. Because the Divenet is gone now, and we who are left have migrated higher each year, away from the cities and the war. Like the Divenet, we drink dew and gathered rain. We eat seeds, fruits, tubers, insects that have become delicacies. And, like the Divenet, we sleep in trees.

I was in flight when I met the pollinator at a wind dance on the limestone plateau. I'd serviced my last soldier. They're all mercenaries now, in it for the money. Valor doesn't exist, so how can a woman admire them. There amidst those long, trailing flags commemorating the lost world, among the prism spectrums of silk windsocks, the dervish swirl of kites and an occasional aquamarine bat, I moved, powered only by air, and the pollinator appeared, aerial, before me. We reached for each other the way birds swoop together. And when the dance was over, we retired to my bower. There we practiced a flight more fleshy, sprawling across damp earth, drinking each other for water.

He'd grown up in the rainforest preserve. His parents worked there, keeping alive what species they could. They'd rocked him in a hammock slung amidst leaves, bathed him in pools where jaguars drank. He made the rounds with them, helped them keep up the undergrowth, cultivate the essential fungi. He knew every bird, and repeated with his parents the prayers for the flourishing of insect populations. And when from time to time the multinationals sent their raiders, the pollinator helped his mother and father devise sabotage--sand in a fuel tank, microbes in the drinking water, spikes hidden in the trunks of the satinwood trees.

We were busy all through the velvet night, until first light lit the horizon. Then we slept, his chest against my back, his right arm around me, hand holding my secret nest.

The pollinator stops. We whisper, though there's no one to hear. There are only a few secrets left, and we're keeping them. Some day the Divenet may come back, or a new bird or moth fall in love with the Ooallecia. In the meantime the pollinator kisses my face, little kisses. He looks into my eyes for confirmation. Now we slip on the harnesses, get the rope ready. This is the steep part, up this cliff of uluhe, through violets vining the halas' trunks. Hold by hold we flit upward, quantum and fluid. I can see the blossom above us, nodding on its stalk. Beside me this man, a stream of blue vibrations. He is water and a little flesh, breathing. We are energy, and we never stop moving. We smell like sea salt, hand over hand, to the flower's lip.

Before the mercenaries took over, there were plenty of sweet boys. I used to find one, seduce him, then tear him to pieces. There were bumper crops, and everything worked the way it was supposed to. Now I offer myself to the soldiers, but they can't get it up. They tear each other to pieces, but the seeds wither in the ground.

I may be divine, but if the seeds don't grow, I won't be around much longer either. Not production but produce is the word: root, stem, blossom. You know my many names, their syllables resounding down through history, names like a cascading lustrum of water. Now my kingdom has diminished to this pinnacle, in the ether above this island afloat in the sea. But do your mourning for savannahs, lakes, jungles. Mourn the wetlands. Do not mourn for me.

This is the moment toward which we've climbed. Now from the vial attached to his belt he lifts the tiny wand, dips it into the Ooallecia's crevice. Then he leans across the flower and kisses me. I am here to make the pollen take.

We have to hurry. The Divenet knew this instinctively, and flew from flower to flower in a frenzy. The pollinator and I have thirty-six hours to re-enact our wedding at each of the eleven other shrines. Our vow not to each other but to the Ooallecia.

This is the man I've looked for all my life.