Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing
in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallow-
brown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle bean-
dripping locust and the still so innocent fruit
trees — bare-boughed and newly blossoming — skinnily
shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my
“now” [in this pictured perfect] four-
year-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie
low. I remember hiding in the fort
too: bedtimes once how snug among books and the plush
beasts we spoke the speech of angels. Now the world is huge-
ly hushed. The winter sky is hard, kiln-fired
blue. The cherry wood retouched with buds. And small,
untimely flowers like blood-drops on the snow.
•
Time lapsed. Time dwelt. There was nothing
apparently to those rumors of rescue
or reprisals. Absence only
emptied the mind. The fond heart felt
light — likewise lifted right and justly up
to praise the day as it was to high
heaven. You were a “find”: rare, rose-
lipped, hennaed, ochred, kohled, long black-
stockinged O like one of Schiele’ s urewig
girls, flashing a shy semaphore —
spelling eloquently out the f-
word, tenderly revisiting its history.
Lust — like love lost — was the catalyst:
exquisitely expedient, unchanged.