You put the phone down a moment
and I am left listening
3,000 miles across Atlantic cables (or is it
now a satellite) as you drop a glass
in the sink, wash it down the drain, shake
water from your hands I can't abandon the line
to light a cigarette or turn down
the radio, I'm hooked, drawn as
sound echoes through your space
patterning my radar (or is it sonar)
with angles
and surfaces, the room you're in now
and the room beside it and it too
the hall, closets and porcelain bath,
no-balcony-but-two-windows open onto the street
with its spitting north German drizzle
and the underwear you stand in
when the glass reflects your body
as you lean out
and pull closed the pane.
The anchorite finds one corner of the dark to stand in
half the day, from the first breath of sunlight through the slit
'til noontime when the petitioners come, pushing in
scribbling she can not read, apples and pears she cannot eat. Her gums
throb at the thought of fruit, she so hungry for it, the taste and smell
of the outside still alive in it so she is left peeling back the skins
with her fingernails, sucking juices
in the night as bats do, her eyes widening and staring to pin down
the dark, which being infinite and ever outspreading, a secret
hunter, throws out its net and pulls her in.