The trunks of the vine are black and twised, the bark scored with the effort of pushing up through thick, rocky soils. I don't know what the earth wants, but, caked thick and crowded, it calls me, begging for unnamed, unnameable things - words without sense, expressed in the course of water on the steep slopes of the Black Mountains, ot the flight paths of hurrying birds. I know there is an intention in the landscape, an attempted communication, centred on the black body of my incomprehension. Planets communicate with other planets, chlorophyll vibrating with the passage of interstellar particles, but I alone am lonely, watching the sky for portents, awaiting my call. Above the serried rows of vines, a harvest moon rises into the still night, but no hail is heard, no postman's knock, no crackling of radio receivers disturbs the trellis wires. Satellites pass overhead, their faces averted, their antennae pointed outwards, like my own, but receiving back no signal from the cold, vast emptiness of space.

In the field behind the winery, between the ranks of trellised vines, my lover rolls his coveralls to his knees, revealing taut, sun-reddened skin over thick flesh, stained with grape-juice. It has pooled in the tight cleft of his chest, and there are seeds in his pubic hair, as if he has swum naked in the vats, macerated the grapes with each constriction of his thighs. He holds his thick root in both hands, pulling back the skin to reveal the wine-dark head. My mouth is open, inhaling the wind, the wet earth, him, and he pushes into me, filling my mouth, rubbing against my palate. I smell his scent: sweat and ethyl acetate, the tang of carbon dioxide, as if his blood is in ferment, consuming itself to become stronger. Juice runs down my chin.