Some things are off the record:
love songs and snapshots; pages from lost magazines;
sand grains, or dust, in a letter from Puerto Madrin
or Nova Scotia;

yet this is our subsistence, day by day:
the colour of  a poppy on a foreign
postage stamp, a blue that makes the sky
more credible as refuge; how the spirit

lingers on a flyleaf or a faded
postmark; how the shadow
wanders home
from days of mint and rain;

and always the continuity
of distance: the meadows and highways
running away to a language no longer spoken:

a lamp left on all night, in some far window;
the post on the table;
the grace of a stranger’s hand.