Letters Found in the Lake House

The letters were in a writing desk that hadn't been opened in sixty years, in a lake house that had stopped expecting anyone. Most of the ink had gone the color of weak tea. Some pages had taken on water long ago and dried into soft topographies.

They were love letters, though almost none of them said so directly. That generation wrote around the point the way a lake goes around a stone — you could see the shape of the thing by the way everything bent near it.

One line survived on a page otherwise lost: 'I will keep it the way the water keeps the moon.'

We engraved that sentence's cadence — not its words, which belong to its author — into the first Sonnet cuff. A single fine line of script, circling, never quite closing. Gilded Poetry began there.