the dark-vowelled birds

When they were very much in love, even then, there was one day or maybe it was two days when in the aching night she lingered at the corner of the street underneath his window. The light cracked overhead. At the chest of the foothills two russet and darling deer ambled darkly, lit now and then by the yellow yield sign. She was peering into the part of the future where they were falling asleep already, sick of each other’s heat, in separate privations. She was thinking that even when they had clung to each other with the force and desperation they did in every other memory, what she made was as much love as it was desolation. Had they been, and of this she is not sure, much more like two halves of a clam shell, held closed by the extraordinary force of a creature trying to remain alive? She was thinking about loss, in the brave sense that they both knew there was no winning, that someone was left and someone was leaving. She knocked on the door but her thoughts stuttered, and she looked at the accidents of the body, and quoted from the privilege of being.