A match whose flare
Is closed from fear
In the cupped hands
Of our uncanny holding,
We make the walls flicker
With our whispers.
Together we come
Zooming in.
***
The curation of my old notebooks and typescripts continues. A first draft conveying this image is forty years old, but the experience it alludes to certainly pre-dated even that moment of relative maturity. At some point in the not-so-distant future, there might have to be a footnote attached to explain that in those years, couples took pleasure in smoking together, that cigarettes were lighted with matches, which had to be sheltered from wind.