Girlhood

If your bearded friend helps you catch the trout barehanded in the pool of the dream and you carry it in his pail barefoot up the rocky stream to the playhouse where he fries it in his pan; if you snip the dill for the carrots and then swim until your lips are bluer than the lake where will it take you? Not anywhere as pure and primal as these sunstruck days sistered by starstruck nights. Don’t cloud the drowning brightness of your eyes, don’t answer my asking look with anything but the truth, don’t spill the fresh-picked raspberries on the car seat and stain your shirt with indelible blood. Or spill them, darling. How else will you know the color of crushed time; how else will you feel what it is to change and remember, to lose and absorb this summer inside you, xylem and phloem of your leafy future already starting to spread its shade above us?