The night before I discarded my virginity
like a suit grown tight in the shoulders,
I walked over water frozen—
the apple-red flag limp on its pole,
the ice spidering beneath my boots.
On the pond’s far edge, the ice gave up
and my foot shot into the bottom muck.
I was soaked to the knee but close enough
to shore to save myself merely
by falling forward. I clawed up the bank,
kicked the mud from my sole,
and swigged off the bourbon
that brought me there. It was cold and messy,
and it would be years before I understood
the miracles of this night and the one that followed
when I finally broke into a girl—
how everything fragile is beyond my repair,
how we walk in a world
in which it must look as if we kiss
the apple that’s being destroyed.
But the apple is always
delicious, and the pond refreezes
every year, sometimes down to the bottom—
a giant lens so full of inclusions
that nothing is perfectly seen.

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