Taken from Secrets

// Paige Sullivan

“I am never deliriously happy and always secretly ashamed.”
— Anonymous

I think I liked you best in December,
when I gathered twelve months of memories,
showered them into your lap: sandy shells
periwinkled to a softness that beckoned sleep.
Maybe I should have picked one up
and peered through the dark whorl
to the soft-bodied, silent secret of you,
the shame that gelled and mildewed, cypress green.
Winter blinded our eyes with snow sudden
and silken like netted cobwebs too fine to tear.
That month cocooned us in your tepid sleep,
me awake and watching  the nights from windows,
the sky a blue so deep it burned from the inside.