A little because we are not catching your voice entirely.
OK.
Is that better?
Yes.
OK.
Thanks.
Next group of poems, I would call them
about love and politics.
First poem is called Distance.
It's about the way in which, though distance is usually seen
as something to be overcome, it can also
be something that allows you space for the imagination
to be exercised, a kind of saving distance.
The old man across the courtyard,
reading alone in his window seat,
looks like a real student awed by the vision
and honesty of a page.
When over here, he might look bored or lonely.
If the woman at the door this evening,
who asked for my signature, had knocked over there,
she wouldn't have looked as she did,
hurried, merely, and graying, and fat,
with a son and daughter behind her squabbling over a toy.
Even here, had I stood back far enough,
her speech on the arms race and covert wars
would have sounded serious.
Now that she's passed from sight,
with a long view her neighbors refused to take,
I try to imagine her in the distance arriving home.
By now, she's hanging the three coats in the hall
beside the landscapes her children painted
in school, which look no brighter to her
than the one she did herself 30 years back,
the same dragons and swampy woods.
She'll have to stand back farther
to imagine how the paintings might
look one day with their dark hues brighter,
their fears cast out.
Whatever helps her to see that far
is a power I should attend to more.
I should think about why it behaves
this way, giving her yearnings that the present can't satisfy,
not even the present silent world of the people
across the courtyard, beyond the endless arguments of last week
that people over here are still repeating.