If I forget to tell you, daughter, keep your head if your hands are severed: you can still eat pears straight from the tree with your mouth. If your hands are severed, wear silver fists until your new ones bud in spring. Keep these shining charms to remind you how fruit tastes when you’re bleeding. Daughter, don’t believe there is always a place for you—an empty cottage, as if the person living there wandered off and lost his way back. You might think your skull is like a library, where each moment is catalogued and waiting. Daughter, I believed it. Then autumn was pulled down behind me like a cheap picture studio backdrop of fallen leaves, everything rusted. If I forget to tell you, choose a word and let it live alone in your mouth a while. Pears, pears, pears. Sometimes there isn’t room for more. Daughter, where silence is permitted to grow, it grows.

If I lost you in the Schwarzwald, I’m not sure I could bring you back. These deep Germanic woods, stinking of bear fur, half the footpaths grown over, have their own rules. If I turn away for one moment, a hawk could swoop down and carry you high into a treetop. You’d be long-lost. Babe in the wood, you must have some bird in you already. I thought it first finding the tiny nest inside the Christmas tree after you were born. Then again watching you crane to see leaves fluttering overhead. You love the trees so. Even in the Black Forest, slack orange tulips fallen from the poplars are beautiful enough to eat—seemingly sugared, as if off a cake. My little tow-headed, rosy-cheeked girl, you’ve been fattened on happiness, mother’s milk, mother love. You’d make some witch quite a treat. So let me carry you. We’ll sing to stay awake. We’ll keep one eye on the trees. As long as we are touching, nothing can harm us.

Yes, there was always danger. Zeppelins dragged their shade around the orchard like slow-moving clouds. Still the sun pinned on us crisp, sweet cameos: Star Ladies, Pink Pearls, Black Gilliflowers, Mothers. I’m sure some were flawed, some bruised and soft, but everything is perfected by distance. Nostalgia clouds like bloom—that fine, gray dust children shine off on their sleeves. A hundred years ago, I was promised an inheritance: turn-of-the-century Golden Drops glinting like vintage brooches. Instead I am bare. Cut me down as you did the others. It hurts, but not as you might expect. I imagine myself a freestone fruit: The pit clings to the flesh but breaks free easily.