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Poetry is a foreign language to you,
as your numbers are to me. We are immigrants,
spending nights at our trade -- I, an old woman
quilting odd pieces of life together, and you,
a thatcher in the lamplight, patching your paper roof.
Occasionally the kettle sings, and we look up
and smile at each other, and it's good this way, isn't it?
To live life in a proper room with curtains and tea,
a little story written in respective cursive script
that our friends find pretty-slanted and easy-to-read...

Publicly, we share a language of mixed martinis,
threaded olives, salad bowls of spring and summer,
small finger foods of conversation brushed with cultured ease...
my photographs, your recent calculations, our separate schedules
threading our collaborate beads... but it's good like this, isn't it?
Erickson's theorized parallel play, and Eliot's take
on toast and tea...
We are comfortable with each other, without ever being
so impolite as to barter our citizenry.