Oceans apart

Sometimes you don’t feel the distance, you talk

through the stretched time zones, nearly every day,

carefully aligning your staggered clocks.

Sometimes it’s just a text – ‘okay?’ ‘okay.’

At other times, the distance is a log

from here to the vanishing point, its weight

unwieldy, no language, no dialogues

to lift it, to break through, communicate.

So you leave it hanging, leave things alone,

you wipe off the scary scenes in your head.

You keep mumbling, it’s nothing, it’s the phone.

It's not him. It’s just the phone that’s gone dead.

Nothing’s golden at a remove, silence

equals no rare metal beyond a distance.