Three o'clock and the whole of Valencia lies down.
The butcher, the bank, the old men on the bench by the church —
everybody horizontal, everybody pretending.
We pretend too, for about four minutes.
Shutters down. The green slats
letting in their thin bars of white fire
across the floor, the sheet, your knee.
It is too hot to touch. We agree on this.
We agree on it seriously, like a treaty,
lying a careful hand's width apart,
your back damp, my hair stuck to my neck,
an orange on the nightstand going soft
because nobody has the energy to peel it.
Too hot. Absolutely.
I count the stripes of light across your shoulder blade.
Seven. You shift. Eight.
You say my name into the pillow
in that voice you use for asking the time,
and the treaty, which was never ratified,
which nobody signed,
quietly dissolves
somewhere around your hip.
Afterwards — no, I won't tell you about the during,
the during belongs to the shutters —
afterwards the church bell
remembers it is a church bell and rings five,
and the city stretches and gets up
and opens its shops and its mouth,
and we lie in the wreck of the sheet
sharing the orange at last,
segment by segment,
your fingers sticky, mine worse,
neither of us in any hurry
to be a person again.
