I carefully arranged the mask of buckram
curtains on my swan-pit features
like a blue-collar archangel who has turned
herself into a pet heron.
My father’s old tied flat shorn of its partitions—
Mama reading, lamplit, sitting by the rose—
the necessary table set for six people—
a sip of two days’ ago’s tea:
fellow-traveller, the content may be ours
but the voice is theirs—‘Northern Elegies’—
books interleaved with crumbled rice paper,
never-ending marks of uncomradely respect.
What difference in touch, white on green,
between the fur smell and the moss smell,
the flower value and the rose relaxed,
had you in mind? The hedge of clipped maple
as yet unringed with winter wreaths.