---

Her other self steps out
under the hotel-lights,
with the sun lowered,
as the early dusk scowls:

In heels she copes, as ever,
on irregular paths and routes,
a recall of her airline days,
those trips less troublesome,

just turbulence and trolleys:
These punters, these travellers,
more equal in measures
of demands and sullen desires,

and not so easily stepped over,
but, in her head, in her way,
her coping with passengers is:
they all pay, they all deserve:

Holding her coat collar-tight,
chin-wrapped against them all,
swinging her bag in the other hand,
on time, on her high price spoor.

---

---

He sits in his cooled car
watching the moon’s
unclothed glow draw
past the back-lit clouds,

and he thinks about
her stripped disquiet,
her pale, tightened, skin,
how her muscles felt,
under her folding over

and his locking in;
and he can still smell
her on his fingers,
and he pulls out
those screen wipes

and rubs, and rubs,
but she’s still there,
under his wedding ring,
in his sweated palms,
on the locked wheel,

and he is unable to remove
her scented presence,
even with the wet-wipe
of fake pine forests.

---

---

The intensity of morning light
beyond the thin curtains,
signaled that promised snow:
As predicted, as forecast,
as talked about last night,
an imminent-probability.

He knew it was there
before he opened the drapes:
It was an almost-glow
off the fat fresh fall – heaped
over the rooftops, cars, streets
and gardens, and then the horizon.

He held the curtain slightly ajar
and hard-pressed his nose
against the windowpane,
feeling the cold from outside
reach in to him, through the glass,
its difference bit his skin.

He absorbed the bleached landscape,
knowing that the kids, only the kids,
would be pleased, as she turned
in the wide bed behind him,
and then breathed noisily, abruptly,
a deep sleep change;

she was sucked, back into the last
dream-rubbed phase:
He thought about waking her,
with an offer of a tea, but decided
letting her lie in would score,
a few relationship-points.

---