Silence is a hard examiner:
as strict as the line of pines
that patrols the horizon,
or the white glove that arcs from the arm
of implacable darkness.

Somewhere, someone has closed the filing cabinet,
signed off,
and gone for lunch.
The official form is left unfilled,
thirsting for red ink.

The skeletal remains of spectacles,
picked clean by a bureaucratic spider,
are spread on a bench.
Robbed of perspective,
their sockets frame infinity.

Fifty years ago, suburbia turned the key
on the floral curtains and the cuckoo clock,
and waited on the wrong platform
for a world of barbed wire
with the wind in its teeth.

The bearded man,
the boy in borrowed overcoat and outsized cap,
the girl who dreamt of happiness:
they didn't know their measured steps
led only to a tumult of shoes.