Our Shared Insistence on Secret Histories

Laying down loose hay where we walk so that it will warm up in the sun and melt the ice beneath it. One plans, plots, prefers. In the distance, at roughly what's called the property line, maple trees rise leaflessly into the sky like the fists of witches. Art, you call it, while I say it's just passing time the way I taught myself, back when time was a thing you could escape. Women occupied a lot of my attention once poetry won the mostly-fixed race but now the tenor of my focus is shifting. Wind blows and I look away from it towards the river. A camera is an argument that one no longer needs to make, which is to say, one is confused about what made that argument seem valuable in the first place. An emptiness follows our shared insistence on secret histories, as surely as meaning derives itself from the past. Here, the stoves are mostly ornamental and the stairs unreliable. Loving chickadees is no defense against the darkness you allow by refusing to speak her name. How close we get to Jesus, those of us who sold our ears for a song.