You made me crude because you were afraid and too easily in awe—

but I also loved that about you, the sincerity of your love, the centrality

of your worry. Had I intervened to privilege one

over the other, it would have been all you remembered.

All you thought about, that entrance. Even as it was,

you said I visited, but those divas and reformers weren’t me—

they spoke for me only in the literal sense in which every radius

of a wheel is tempted to believe that it, in its rigidity,

alone was chosen to support the whole miracle of motion.

In fact, I cast no spells and called no witnesses. I let you find your own.

I let you discover that those growing pains are the thing you are.