When twenty miles of sea and city
stretched itself between your door and mine, we lived
inside each others’ skin, compressing
distance into exotic equations
unsolvable outside the act of love.
I moved closer, and you moved away–
space reversed in the lens of an insane
camera, inside shed the skin of outside
and all the mathematicians lost their minds.
Now Buddha’s afire on the windowsill,
slide-rule sparkling between his plaster teeth,
and I’ve misplaced the blank relief of sleep.
Wakeful, I walk the edges of night to my office:
ninety minutes, four-and-a-half miles–
a static, trustworthy, tiresome passage.
A distance that does not change.