when i was nine, trapped in a red, sagging cardigan and round yellow glasses, i had crooked fingers, all straight but for the longest two, bent near the top. sitting on my window sill overlooking the blue vans and the basketball hoop with the torn netting, i would hold my fingers as far from my eyes as my arms would allow and squint until they blurred into a family of four, the tall father stooping to hold his wife’s head on his shoulder. i still have crooked fingers and they are still in love. when i was nine, you were seven and you had a brown mole on your right cheek and maybe you named her, but you would not have told me.
and then eight years passed and i was thinking about waking jeweled in dew and made the mistake of printing too many poems upstairs, leaving them like forlorn children wandering the desks in the attic of the library, calling to each other and drifting to the floor. that is where your brother found them and that is why he asked me for another in the hallway with the grey linoleum by the lockers with the broken hinges. i never meant to do it, but somehow i trapped him with me in my red, sagging cardigan and his roaming feet carried us past broken street lamps, through the blossoming apple orchards, across ravines on fallen trees, down the path through the abandoned brick factory to a hidden green lake, behind the fence at the dump for forgotten art, in a secret tunnel coated in moss, up to the peak of your roof trying to sing our way into the sun, nowhere that was school, and everywhere that was afternoon detention.
your voice reminded me of thyme tea, grey sand, and cattails in august, and when you glared at me and my cardigan on the green bench leaning up against your rough-edged house, i went to all the way to switzerland to escape it and ate no dinner that night.
before summer and the atlantic came and stole us away from each other, you picked purple flowers with your teeth and i had rainbow paint on my cheeks and you talked more than you like but neither one of us could help but know and know and know and crinkle in the right places.
and then it changed, because he left to somewhere to make sandwiches and you brought the painting of the white dress and the lanterns into your orange room and every thursday was for us and no one else, to share grapes and throw away the salami your mother hid in your sandwiches. it was always different than ordinary, without jumping on the stairs but with talking about muffins and things that come from riedlingen and even though my hair turned to wool in the rain and pieces of me sometimes were trapped just above my eyes, it was that pale yellow that will someday be my kitchen where i will make rice. your sister painted a portrait and i wore the white dress with a scarlet ribbon around the waist, while he held my head on his shoulder. and my hands were blank.
when the germans put up the garlands and lights in their gingerbread streets, i kept too still, not because he bid me be quiet, but because he bid me nothing. standing on the fountain, singing without my eyes, wearing only the umbrella your mother borrowed to do her gardening, i see nothing but night and thyme tea and medallions from when you were seven. the longest letter in the world went through a hole in the wall this morning; drink it with milk and honey, my love.
