There are secrets I half-know about you. I photo-know your long blonde bangs and your bungalow. I double moon-know the basic aesthetics of your heart. I daughter-know your shadow greying against the snow. I poet-know your world of forest and blackberry-stains and simplicity in the larger secondhand world of rebel rebels, pop art, and conformist films. Your scar captivates me, the soft bridge on your flexing, fleshy, whipped cream arm, the scar from falling that interminable distance from the apple tree bough’s own break to the ground. I know that much. What captivated you there? Dragged you like a bonded prisoner into heights unknown? Made you taste danger like sharp, unripened blackberries?
I want to know-know the smell of cinnamon sauntering through the rooms of your house, pillowing like the ash of an exploding star from the little, cozy oven. I almost make out conversations, elephant conversations barging suddenly into arguments. No. I want rabbit-warren talk. Make me know firsts, fascinating flights of the cardinal we cannot see here, mountain-locked. Harvest one memory from the blackberry patch. Don’t color it sepia. Don’t sigh with the breath living beneath your workaday lungs. Make one secret grow full and blossom like the claret dancing skirts of our hollyhocks.
