(for Joanne)

Still winter translates phantoms from my breath,
And spring with its glib greens, its shibboleth
Of birth, renewal, all that shit, evades
These gardens and transplanted colonnades;
A red sky tightropes on the Palisades.
Two blank postcards: one a Merovingian
Gold cup, the other Carolingian,
A reliquary of St. Porphyry.
What can I write you, love? Mere agape,
And How is school, your husband and your son,
When even in this monkish walk, all done
And said, to all ears what I would confess,
Is how, like Occam's razor through the mess
Of language, marriage and geographies
That yet consign us to antipodes,
Your taste, the myrrh and chrism of you wet
Anoints my lips, your missive, my gazette?