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 breeze.