Corollary

maybe it's tiny maps you've hidden
blue-green behind the shutter of your eyelashes
long ago this town was watery, photosynthetic, insurgent
now rivers and canyons hide in tiny fish scale, in that secret swish
behind your lids where they live again only in flash
flash when your smile projects their light onto walls.

I don't know you but I know your hair
Pattee Canyon dirt—I mean August drought dirt when
stones of the creek bed (which once looked glassy and
blue-green under the swirl of breeze-and-cottonwood dazzle
like your eyes) become the color of dust and sunlight.
I've never seen you in the sunlight—only in flash of window
in the cafe where you work—and I am much younger than
my sisters who tell me there is no secret
but I don't think the known can travel person-
to-person (otherwise all those books I read
would have given me more years than twenty-two) but can only be harvested
from frozen acres and water and heartbreak and
I'm thinking there are so many good secrets like chewing
slowly and wearing sunscreen
some lead to cruel love and war and murder but
they are the only maps we have to this town.

and because I was twenty-two when you slid
into the window-light I saw the momentary comet
of your face, and if we were married I wonder
would your face be beautiful behind spinning dust
of headlights, under the gray-yellow light of years,
kitchens, I won't say I love you, no, because I don't
know what that means and because there are
secrets and I won't mind if I never know you as long as
your hair keeps the weather warm.