rooster-crow and the repetitive tap of a hammer like the tick of a clock in the distance woke me and I followed what was left of your voice like the tracks of an animal to the edge of the copper water. Though I knew there were Cottonmouths thick as ropes, I waded into the cool shadows and then up a hill where trees grew, preordained, laid out in perfect rows like headstones. When I had reached that place where we had left the past, and shed even our skins for love, I saw them: the blackberries surrounded by briers. Supple and sparkling as jewels. The same ones that we had subsisted on, with bleeding fingers, for one afternoon of our lives. And though I remembered all the fears we shared like sackcloth and ashes, and I knew the danger of reaching into the unknown, (it seemed like there were serpents waiting beneath every beautiful thing) blindly grasping for the sweetness that everyone longs for, and I too have always feared those things I cannot see, I put my faith in the innocence of nature. I tried to believe in the benevolence that exists if you go beyond the fear, and so I found them again: the blackberries, the fruit not forbidden to those who love, huge and succulent, and so full of grace, they were almost too heavy to bear.