The love here is already halfway lost, and still it will not leave the body. Someone once claimed the constancy of a northern star; she answered from the dark and the bar, then drew a map of Canada with his face on it twice under blue TV light. What remains is not the argument but the aftertaste: he is in her blood like holy wine, bitter and sweet at once. She could drink a case of him and still be on her feet—capacity and intoxication in the same breath, devotion that does not knock her down so much as keep pouring through her.

She names herself a lonely painter living in a box of paints, frightened by the devil and drawn to those who are not. Love, he told her, is touching souls; part of him keeps coming out in her lines. A woman with a mouth like his warns her to stay if she can, but be prepared to bleed. The dulcimer keeps a light, held pulse under a voice that rises and softens without ever breaking the room open. What the song leaves standing is not heartbreak as collapse, but absorption: the beloved as sacrament and hazard, already inside the blood, still drinkable, still dangerous.