To Dr. E.S.

Dear Emma
you are wise,
conversant with the inevitable
and have the patience to allow
bouts of optimism to make their
vain, occasional entrances.

You just wait
knowing the other thing
does not appear unavailingly.
You are silent
aweful for what you know
will travel down to the slow, real.
You don't want to be right.

Somewhere in your blond
European life with all its
traditions and stories,
you have found out how to watch
without a sound.
You can see the spectres that are
invisible to me, born in the
puritan-hero West.