My wife doesn’t want me to write about her superpower. The world should not know how she howls down the moon and turns an ordinary day into something the Hubble telescope might see from a billion years ago when the earth still steamed with cracks and fissures, when eukaryotes teemed and cells were strung together like glass beads. Of course, I say, I won’t tell about when we find a warm place on this first winter night and you  find me in my cave of covers pulled over my head reading Sappho and “Sonnets from the Portuguese” through fogged glasses—my grinding teeth trussed with my Oral-B mouthguard, or that you conjure, by merely sliding in beside me, the desire to sigh and imagine myself as a small god visiting from the mountains suddenly convinced that it’s better to be human and die than be a boundless body, incorruptible and shining like a golden calf in Sinai’s sun. And why would I tell of these things that so many know on this very night, when a billion lovers lie tangled, even those like me, whose rotting body’s wasting is so advanced that when I get up in the night to pee, I do dribble a bit and forget to put the toilet seat down, mistake the closet door for our bedroom, and slide to the floor and dream of sleeping alone.

she gasps —

my hands are

so cold