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. 
