The one thing you want to portray
is the one thing it lacks.
Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:
a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,
or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen
for longer than you had expected.
You do this again and again, as if your life
depended on nothing,
light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound
of shoppers and that constant sense you have
of some place less than half a mile from here,
a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone’s bed,
the place you could be right now, with snow coming down
through neon, or that baize light on your hands
that makes you think of summers long ago,
the ‘water’s edge’, the ‘faint breeze in the pines’,
those girls you really loved, before this patient
look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.