It was late in the year
and forests were burning a long way off
the day the smoke arrived, almost unperceived.
It came as a ghost, as many ghosts,
visible in the mouths of tunnels.

Now that your neighbor is dead,
you recall casual greetings on the stairs,
snatches of show-tunes in corridors,
and you look down into that well,—

the well of uncertain light and air, and see an absence
which neither snow nor corrosive rain effaces,
and the absence returns your glance, it follows like a cur
extending its tongue of smoke towards your hand.