Love Poem to Be Read to an Illiterate Friend

I have had to write this down in my absence and yours. These things happen. Thinking of a voice added I imagine a sympathy outside us that protects the message from what can’t help, being said. The times you’ve kept your secret, putting on glasses or glancing into a page with interest, give again the hurt you’ve forgiven, pretending to be one of us. So the hope of love translates as a series of hidden moments where we like to think someone was fooled into it. Who was I then who filled these days with illegible warnings: the marriages broken, the land pillaged by speculators, no word for a stranger? This island where I thought the language was mine has left me lonely and innocent as you or that friend who let you copy his themes until the words became pictures of places you would never go. Forgive it then that so much of after depends on these, the words which must find you off the page.