oh it is the autumn light
that brings everything back in one hand
the light again of beginnings
the amber appearing as amber.

W.S. Merwin, September Plowing

Whiskey and warm beer and meaningless words. Parking lots, sun shafts, shivers of thought. The hard clear blazing of the stars. A half-drunken love for this wilderness, its sharp smell of pine resin, frozen and snarling with life. But I am nearly dead with cold.

Him and her and me and now and this and here and us. A cheek to a warm shoulder’s hollow, a careless arm across a bare chest, one heel pressed to the hip’s ridge (unyielding, mountainous), four fingers pressed to a paper-thin wrist. The still, silent tangle of untethered bodies, the night-quiet darkness, the dreaming skin of dawn. Three singing pulses, incandescent, synchronous. I want for nothing. I want this. I want nothing? I want.

Every touch seems stolen in the ice-blood of sleep. I wish my mind to be quiet and contrite. It craves incandescence. I hurt like hell.