For a while I shall still be leaving.
Looking back at you as you slip away
Into the magic islands of the mind.

Coming into eighty
I slow my ship down
For a safe landing.

Yes, I am home again, and alone.
Today wrote letters, then took my dog
Out through the sad November woods.

There is a thin glass
Between me and everything I see.
The glass is pain.

Becoming eighty
Might be nothing much
If I could be well,

Dark gathers
In this wood
Without weather

Avenging ivy padding up the wall of the Abbey’s west wing
Could only be part of a masterplan to rescue posterity
From a curling, yellowing, nonetheless dangerous manuscript

On the mantle the straw hat
of her lover's father
sat with a bullet hole

We prefer to call it Le Système D,
the labyrinth of our permanent exile,
the magic houses and identity cards:

the ladder keeps going. The black dust

that peels the paint off your car