April 13, 2002

Dear Cathy,
     Forgive me for the fights I never started. I didn't know how to argue with the sunrise that morning, let alone with the granddaughter of an entomologist who learned to ride her bicycle in an old plantation ballroom.
     I'm still not sure how a handwritten fortune cookie led to my naming your car after sweet showers and small clumsy feet, but in any case do not regret that your next word has become the ledge I am content enough to lean farther and farther over. This inability to give you back your plums may swallow me yet, but then again (I tell myself), who is to say what will become of the apricots?
     The glow of clocks in your eyes haunts as you develop me, one of your photographs. A one-year exposure to this day, and look what you have done to innocence: the other morning, I sucked your nipple to wake you up. It's the contortions of insects caught in your cerebral amber that keep me going (make me stay).