Winter, the life of winter. One hour since the darkness. Remember the sun? It was a blast of white, smeared with pools of warm yellow, and it made you smile. Smile to remember. Telephone conversation: him and her, only the two of them, connected by a thin wire with vibrating cardboard cones at each end. Listen. He strides across the parking lot, kicking gravel with scuffy boots, looks at the boots as he walks, watches them mount the cement stairs to the apartment building. He likes the way they look. Supple, hard but not mean. Into the apartment at the end of the hall he goes, shucking coats and layers with a sort of frenzied efficiency. They fall away, fall on the bed. He picks up the phone, picks out the number from that front room of his memory, the little room with the door always open. The number comes pouring out, slides down his arm to the phone before he can think about it, bathes the phone in the delighted flow of its pattern. “Hello?” “Hey! What’s up?” “Oh, nothing much. Just got back from work a little while ago.” Smell. Memory conversation. Treacle voice. Warm breath. More excited than she sounds. Image of him in the garden, last summer, out by the fence next to the alley, shoveling the sod, with no shirt on and the sun licking him raw. For her to watch. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” “Well, hey. It’s a lovely night. I’m supposed to meet some people at ten, but until then, how’d you like to tumble around in bed for a while.” “That might be nice.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” “Okay. You want me to come over, then?” “Sure.” “Oh—one thing. Given that I just got back from the woods, do you want me clean or dirty?” She smiles a wicked smile. “Dirty!” The scented bath water flows clear, teasing circlets around the drain and down, down. “Okay.” Hanging up the phone, he feels a whirling in his gut, Attention! it says, and he laughs a little. The little pieces of bark and moss and grime, and the rocks in his shoes, all sing along as he whistles across the street to her place. He raps on the door and she lets him in. She is clean, still steamy from the bath that she took with rose-petal water. She stands, open pose, as he approaches. Her skin shines out around the curves of a white cotton dress. He can almost feel how plump and clean she is, and it makes the dirt and cedar-smell on him itch more insistently. Conversation. Come in. Feel. she takes his arm leads him back back into the pile of blankets and pillows that is her bower he enfolds her she is buried in the earth he is growing in her she tastes the cedar he tastes oldfashioned guilt is something to laugh about the silver hairbrush on her dresser gleams victorian lovers half-yielding watch from the walls blushing hotly enraptured with the sweat and the dirt like a river the current is muscular it ripples across his chest playing her nails in his buttocks sing out you must be caught! punished! I am a young girl in the garden amidst the freshening smell of mulch your hands black dirt my new white dress my new white skin smeared black with dirt stark contrast and the squirming dirt presses my back now too holds me against you it is forbidden he drinks her unsecret musky want --it is sweet! so sudden-- and the lovers on the walls in pearl and ivory cry yes wrapped up in each other they fall asleep in her bed Two hours since the darkness. The dead of winter. Remember the sun? How it shone out from beneath the tree line, over the last hill before you got back to the car, and so warm and forlorn there it made you smile.