He called and said he wanted her
in the room on the mattress
tracing her toes on the walls.

The phone cut. It had snowed
all night. The lambs in the fields
thought they’d died

with their heads inside their mother’s wool.
He arrived, burlap on the truck tires,
and took her past closed road signs along

the lake’s diagonal dark, where fishermen in shacks
tapped the ice
to make the fish skitter. The whole way there

he fondled her,
while with the paper heart from her pocket
she kept the windshield clear.