STAININGS

The tea is bitter; I remove the bag casually

to the napkin by my cup, and soon enough find its white field, too,

staining steadily as a browning edge of leaf, spreading

like the inevitable twilight, like an awareness of music,

like the lamp light that is drowning in the known winter outside.

A blank page gets ruined like this, soon as words are put down

and sealed, pressed into layers, or torn carefully

into shapes fragmentary and suggestive. Or say a letter does pass through winding alleys to a secret address, where the words

are reversed in a painter’s mirror, in the shadow of a dance

that is the silhouette of flowers on a peeling wall.

Delivered so, they are no longer the same words; they drift

on an expanse of water, held in the surges and ripples of waves.

Like a note in a bottle, my words are found and unravelled

right in front of my eyes and I’m all but undone.

You stare out, then down, recalling—what?

When you look up at me, your eyes both laugh and cry.

You haven’t seen between my lines but read easily the bitterness in the tea.

Hands on the wheel and looking straight ahead in the mirror,

you take the past born between us and in silence drive off.