The rooms
that enter us
and stay.

We know the doors of them
polished by dream,
the sunlight or the shallows
in each room, bedspread
table Monet print on the wall,
the old-fashioned telephone,
the empty vase.
Springtime
seldom comes,
no one speaks Latin,
the bathroom always far away.

Facts torture with images.
Room after room.

2.
And sure enough
when you wake up
you’re in yet another,

and this room too,
mainland or island,
Anglophone or otherwise,
will play its role
in some night opera
from which you can barely
awaken, like now,
into the freshness of the familiar.

3.
Nothing leaves us.
There is nowhere
for it to go. no border
it can cross to flee
the immensity of here.

4.
Warm sticky danish
coffee in a paper cup
and late to work.
The Apollo gallery in the Louvre.
Melville’s writing desk,
dentist’s office, closet
on Brown Street with the black
seal fur soft inside it.

There is no distance.
And difference is only
a taste on the tongue,
and that too soon fades.

13 September 2020