The husband's cock presses through his fingers, slips
across the sheets. A ghost hand rustles
the woman's dreams as sleep steals in
and out of her body. The man stops,
the woman dissolves into slow breath, and he begins
again, his hips pulsing forward to through his palm and back.
The wife curls upward from a dream
about swimming with her husband in a pond at dawn,
where the fog hovers in the rustling cattails.
She opens her eyes to find his back turned toward her,
the pond frozen over. She touches his hip
and he says, "Go back to sleep."
She is tired of sleep and drowning.
This morning she faces his back,
his shoulder muscles tense, then loose
as his rhythmic hand paces their bed.
The wife memorizes the bends and pores and moles.
She wants to know what to do the next time she is left
by a man who will not go away.