It's all we can do but rent a room.
Old, with a view to the Bay

Ocean turns shore stone into something
finer than air.

It's time that's needed. We want what flees
and forget ourselves. How much the bone

has stretched to shake with laughter. Gone
and come back

crease over crease
marrow combed, tenderly.

Think how relief washed over her when he deplaned,
returned to the coolness of their susceptible world.

Or the sorrow that was deposited like salt in him
when he looked back and she had disappeared.

In these ways we try to recall the unrecorded performances.
Where an emotion held the room in a trance

with the certainty of moonlight through glass.
We do not know where the applause goes.

Hands that work, released,
flutter up like wooden birds to rise, a throng of geese.

The face is a palimpsest. It is not of Greece
or of the Far East.

Its origin is candled by a city
just visible through the window of a rented room.