The Widow  

Old age arrives like a cargo

ship in a thick fog.

The faint sound of a horn announces it,

but it is a surprise all the same, when it

recognizes its outline in a window display.

A dark figure, pulled from the

turbulence of society, sinks in the

silence of the walls, of the evening, where

an orphaned plate gets used to

being single. At the touch of the past,

memory closes up like a clam—

all is vapour, or a blade that

opens the first embraces—lost

pearls on the bottom of decades as a pair.