There is
  an interlude
      within silence,

a white on white chimera,

that anoints the thee and thou

in transubstantiation

  that wafers us.

Standing in this drawing room,
eighteen foot ceilings,
Battery Street windows look out on Fort Sumter
still protecting Charleston's slave trade bay.
No rockect's red glare tonight,
but a musum cocktail party,
awed by the riches that slave trading
  did generate,
though the word "slave"
never came up.

Oh, to be a tortoise
and never need a house.
No realtors, no mortgage,
never a call for
roofers, plumbers...
or ever to build a shelf!

Had Chaucher written of you,
prescient to have told
your Canterbury tale,
"When in April ..."
So long ago,
but you
just a few decades underway  ...
The Quarry man's daughter,
what mid trail story
would he have chalked
on his writer's slate?

You and I could be lichen.
You'd be algae
and I fungus.
E plural unis.
I would envelop you,
not to smoother,
but to romance, house, protect.
You would photosynthisize the sun
filling our pantry shelves.
Oh, what fun we could have
if we were a lichen.

You,
with your pyrite tooth
and zirconia lobes,
those decades of *******
native vitality
for made in asia
Trinketronics!

Reading between between the lines,
the shadow zone of interstitial spaces,
the quiet and rhythm
    separating sentences,
        I senced that your yesterday's day
was one,
      that given a choice,
  you would not choose to repeat.
I repeat this feeling guilty
   that I failed you
by knowingly remaining silent.