\ I Wonder

"So, i just wonder, sometimes," I start, and am distracted by a barrette in her hair, "What is that?" I think. It seems like something a child would wear, made of that old plastic that never seemed to last very long, the snap becoming frayed in a matter of days, and you would have to gather up the ends in your finger tips, squeeze them tighter, maybe even draw the mass into your mouth, press it between your teeth before being able to snap it, blindly into place.

"What do you wonder?"

And now I've forgotten, so I look around to make up something new. I always stand on the verge of confession, and sometimes I do, I step into the little room and draw the curtain, look to the mahogany and follow it down to the carpet, though no light reaches quite that far, and it is possible to speak in symbols, describe so clearly what you see that it is almost like truth.

"You remember those gates? Those hand-carved wooden gates?"

She remembers, only because while there are plenty of doors in the world, there is only one kind that I am always talking about. "Mmm-hmm."

"The tops of those gates were dovecotes. I never knew."

I am holding the photo in my head, the span above the entranceway is no mere decoration, but a shelter for pigeons, the holes bordered with stenciled feathers.

You loved them once before, you forgot them, you uncover some hidden truth, you love them more.

Occasionally you realize something new about a prior object of desire, and all the years of adjustment seem to open like doors into a breezeway, and in the courtyard is the promise of some new affair, and your heels click with a rejuvenated vigor upon the cobblestones, and you don't have the presence to question your endurance, how quickly your heart paces, drowning out the volume of your doubts and your regrets.

You have none.