I like that room, the warm one with the machines where the woman folds her shed skins.

I hang in the broken ceiling, watching her, barely distinguishable from the cold water pipe and the coiled power cable.

I watch her all winter: her long-legged hands, the glinting needles of fur at her nape, her red warmness drifting in mammaly billows.

And now I show myself; pour my flickering head into her sac of air, and slowly, willed against her own will, her face rises like a rising moon, opening palely to mine,

and in the wide O's of her eyes, I see myself: my head like a big cut jewel, the little watch-jewels of my eyes, yes, my tongue the alive nerve of a rock, and I feel her want, a yearning almost, as though for something already about to be lost,

and I offer myself.