Tonight's as cold and clear as glass. Snow falls and then stops. The sky burns with stars. A thicket of stars. A congested city of stars. The snow reflects light like glass shavings, like crumbled stars. Snow is cold water trying to be star-like. Stars are explosions and cosmic dust…

Nonono. It's stupid for me to put the words cosmic and dust together. Dust isn't cosmic. Real dust is personal like dandruff and bad breath, like the socks and candy wrappers and soggy receipts embedded in the floor of my car. Real dust is millions of tiny skeletons, millions of dry, lacey, skin-cell corpses. When Eve saw her flowery and slimy privates and understood their scary closeness, understood how different they were from the distant glassy stars, she covered them up. This hurt God who wanted her private parts to be the same as the stars. God wanted our matted toothbrushes and dirty fingernail clippings to be impersonal and the milky silvery moon to be as intimate as the sweaty smell between our legs. God was hurt so he said "Dust to dust. To dust you will return." He said, "Fuck you, all of you. You'll die." Death still holds the trace of his original plan for everything because it's close and far away at the same time. Death contains every degree of strangeness, every tick on the arc of distance and inch on the spectrum between the abstract and the private. But still, poor Eve. Who can blame a woman for wanting underpants?