You stand at the counter, pouring boiling water over the French roast, oily perfume rising in smoke. And when I enter, you don’t look up. You’re hurrying to pack your lunch, snapping the lids on little plastic boxes while you call your mother to tell her you’ll take her to the doctor. I can’t see a trace of the little slice of heaven we slipped into last night—a silk kimono floating satin ponds and copper koi, stars falling to the water. Didn’t we shoulder our way through the cleft in the rock of the everyday and tear up the grass in the pasture of pleasure? If the soul isn’t a separate vessel we carry from form to form, but more like Aristotle’s breath of life— the work of the body that keeps it whole— then last night, darling, our souls were busy. But this morning it’s like you’re wearing a bad wig, disguised so I won’t recognize you or maybe so you won’t know yourself as that animal burned down to pure desire. I don’t know how you do it. I want to throw myself onto the kitchen tile and bare my throat. I want to slick back my hair and tap-dance up the wall. I want to do it all all over again—dive back into that brawl, that raw and radiant free-for-all. But you are scribbling a shopping list because the kids are coming for the weekend and you’re going to make your special crab cakes that have ruined me for all other crab cakes forever.