I am a long way from home, and this is a poem
about absences and separations.
"Static."
"The storm shakes out in sheets against the darkening window.
The glass flinches under thrown hail.
Unhinged, the television slips its hold,
streams into black and white and silence as the lines go down.
Her postcards stir on the shelf tip over, the lights
of Calais trip out one by one.
He cannot tell her how the geese skull back twilight,
how the lighthouse walks its beam across the trenches
of the sea.
He cannot tell her how the open night swings like a door
without her.
How he is the lock, and she is the key."