Emily Witnesses the Milk Maid and her Lover

In the slough the rain mists through the fallen trunks. Their bodies together are as water the warm breath of the wind moves over. “You have the same mist,” she says to him in her softer voice, the other is a harder voice, the voice of chore buckets and cow teats. This voice suffers his love because he aches inside her. Her words melt; they linger in her throat, ripen on the tongue, and move from her lips to his cheek. How deep and musky his hair smells at the neckline. His eyes changed today (yes, she saw a lizard change— from blue to pink to green back to bluer, they do it by breathing air into their blood, the lizard’s throat bloats, distends as though a rooster’s comb and turns turtle blood.) His lips part and twigs and May apples brim out of his mouth, burnt leaves lingering on his chin. The fragrance of their love. The dark has snuffed out the creek, the crumbling logs where mushrooms spore; the dark extinguishes sin and blankets the rock. She follows him and his lantern deeper into the slough. They will milk long into the night. Oaks, mimosa, the undergrowth thickens with rushes. They will find a place where the moon has lain down for them and the cockleburs have taken in their thorns.