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All dark, compost-dirt rich, the mink

ran over the snow, brown muzzle

leading its body to rodent holes.

It slid into the river, neat as an exhale,

under the pock-marked ice,

then out, dry-furred along the rocks.

Far out on the hill, someone skiing

broke a new trail in snow, called out:

just one more run, just one. Yellow tree light,

three-thirty, half the hill already dark.

Potatoes wrapped in foil soften in coals,

orange spheres, split. In the house

where we thought no one lived, a curtain

shifts, someone checking where the light was now.