"If I had," began the poet, who then delineated his trivial animal ambition in words that, Wesley suggested in tones distant and cooly, offensively superior, were somehow better chosen than other words, even though the feeling of lust/rut/reproduce in them was the same.

If she had, she would bend the slivers of time like grass blades to tell the poet his futility, for what had his ambition gained him but a name and what had all the other gained her but now, fixed moment by moment in place, and here, bound by dimensional walls thin as wafers and yet implacable?

She had had and now had none, and none of it was any part of the poet's passions, but still Wesley's broken whispers pattered against the body only recently hers, raindrops to granite, and she considered that time enough erodes all stone.