The movement between your speech And my silence is just like folding laundry. Take this white cotton sheet, for example.

It gleams between us in the afternoon; An empty sheet of paper waiting for a poem Of your body to be written tonight when I Soak my fingers in the red ink of your hair.

We begin to move it back and forth like an accordion: The snap of cloth, fingers brushing each others', And folds laid down, the way morning will find Us folded into each other, like two memories.

Note: A poem occasioned on watching a man and a woman fold sheets in a coin laundry, and the intense longing for the muse brought about by the shock of glimpsing the first blooms of lilacs in the ice-free yards, here in Toronto.