Today it’s so cold
it’s hard to remember, the frigid
air slipping in through collar, up pant
legs, feasting on the exposed
nose, searching out fragile fingers in
and out of tight pockets, finding
scalloped ears beneath a stocking
cap, keeping lips a thin, hard

line against the day that inside is
a jungle, steamy and a steady
ninety-eight-point-six, where every
living creature, naked and
glistening, luxuriates in a tropical
heat and fecundity, a prelapsarian
paradise of plenitude, where cold
air and shivering bones are never known.