“This time,” I say,
“you mustn’t run away from me.”

I have tied her shadow
to the corner of my eye,
eyelash to eyelash,
and the wind has scratched
her image on the phone box.

As she tries to speak my tongue,
I stop her: “sing as you really appear,
not now, nor in a far,

full-blossomed future,
but for those for whom your message
is a needle through the skin, foreign

and formless, as you were before you came to me
sequined in green, and red, and amber
from the rain-filtered kaleidoscope;

before you breathed onto the glass, on which
reflection spells your pang
into the language of the living.”