I liked the way you were indifferent to my melancholy

and awkward in the way you answered my vapid questions;

or how everything I said would ebb from you

and flow, a week later, into a sea urchin shell, with lavender stripes

and knobby white spirals that traced out my goosebumps in radial symmetry

unveiling that you had been listening, after all.

I had lain it down somewhere on those shores and forgotten it

but when I told you, you said they could be found anywhere.

Weren’t you the one who spoke to the stories in these stones?

How their layers, like the folds in flesh,

could enumerate the sunsets by millions?

Or that, if I looked closely enough, 

I could meet ancestors in search of their half-eroded wisdom

the summer after we skipped across the sea;

I could never fool you the way I had done with all,

so when I dug those paint pots from my pulse

and pressed them into the touchstone of your palms

I trusted you when their iron streaked to gold.