John De Stefano

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.