Her eyes are clouds, rolling blue, lost in the grey tundra of wet city and cracked pavement. She hears voices sometimes and lets them come to her, softly to her the smooth lull of non-clarity, and responds quickly, anxiously, wiping with shaking hands the clear alcohol drool from the dirty oval of her chin.

She's cold sometimes in the transparency of day and snow and shivers around the warm of drink in her coughing throat, opening her lips wider to the kind oblivion; and once heavy with the burn settled tight in her stomach, sleeps, and wakes soon after to the rough kick of a foot against her own, and startled, lifts her white crazed hair and orange knit hat and snarls around broken teeth, snarls and again swells her mouth with the warm drink and begins to speak, aside the collective stammer of black boys singing and girls prancing, long-haired beside quiet men, and of the five o'clock release from the movie house and of children riding invisible horses along to the clicking gait of high-heeled shoes and of old men wrapping scarves about their grey skin, she speaks, away from the sparkle of their eyes and rose-glow of faces fresh to the cold, below their crystal tunes and comfortable hymns, to the only thing not frozen high above her. n