Carrying paper parasols, figures
eliminate the horizon. Indecipherable backgrounds, perhaps a semi-
detached in Islington, a villa in Hull -
whatever, they convey little now the photographer is an elegist. 

Summer in public parks, winter in museums -
imagine what the lives of these people might have been:
he was the kind who files used matches in the box;
she was just one body among others.

These could be future murder victims. 
But the authority of documents is just
the semi-darkness of a front room
removed. On television a man beats a woman in slow motion.

We keep our courage up by forgetting one another.
He comes to Rome to undergo Parisian rain;
she believes camaraderie is over-rated
in a room where each piece of furniture is three miles from the next.

Each slips on the thinnest proviso, each reaches
out for the future that noon sweats intention from: it belongs
in the eighteenth century. In June they mean to visit  -
once those infernal nocturnal insects have been lost in the bronze of a dawn

borrowed from statuary. Until then the butterflies must get their camphor,
the next-door-neighbours receive their blessings
the better to be rid of them. Her ceremonially pointed finger 
withdraws into the fist. Their convalescent chatter 

evaporates like the lawn's dew. Friendless,
surrounded by men in cheque suits, he will remember this a decade hence.
For now he counts his blessings with his enemies: they'll come
to visit, they'll come (but at their leisure) to nothing.