WHEN WE ARE ALONE

When we are alone
in my own profile
on a sound proof studio
in a room on a back street
up from the underground
watching the snow flakes
on the garden asphalt
as blackbirds rise from the sky
for a drink in the fountain
receiving my French bread
through corridor shadows
as a stranger and guest
emerges with a bandage
under a collar vest
with a nearly broken arm
who quietly smiles
from a southern
unspoken tongue
near my breakfast bench
in a vault of a poet's corridor
as the sunshine merges
enlisted in the sky's labyrinth
for he is apparently
an academic scholar of Poe
whose January birthday
is on the nineteenth
like me born in Boston
as he is given
a red wine toast
but my visitor
does not look sickly
as he relates falling
by the Cape's river beds
mostly under a first light sun
and being hung
and slowly entwined
on a starry night
who hitch hikes
in the geometric wood
by my dunes and vines
in this New England
tourist neighborhood
crawls on all fours
stealthily to my flagstones
at the gates
and I'm wondering
if he is a ghost
or the real person
and author himself.