Background Noise

Keeping in touch after such a long distance
through the tunnel of time and the sense
that everything is collapsing:
the houses and streets, the memories

and the colors. The past and future,
war and forgetting, echos and canyons,
are drifting into themselves, no anchor
to hold still and be quiet and consider

the calm, whether this is what we want,
this is what we need: a swirl
of emotion and metal tangled and trampled
into weeds and distance and rust

so that what once was known, everything
contained by definition, held in place,
fragments from disuse, rusts, breaks free,
and is swallowed by sand and gray dust.