Your coffin was so small, Only I knew it was full of candlewick bedspreads, orange pekoe tea leaves smoking chimneys over wet peat;

that steam rose there from sweet winter herbs and pearl onions and marrow bones boiling all one afternoon on the oven top in a stock pot,

and if I add the bolt of silk you once brought home and rolled out on a table, showing the gloomy colour pewter becomes by candlelight, it is because

the secret histories of things deserve to linger, to belong again to the coil of your hair I found once as a child, dried out by shadows, in a shut-tight wooden box

in which was a mirror with an ornate handle, an enameled back, the original mercury amalgam blemishing the glass from which your face disappeared years ago.