Or she would turn up The Songs of Leonard Cohen
on the rickety old gramophone.

And you knew by the way she unbound her tresses
and stepped from her William Morris dresses

you might just as well be anyone.

Goat’s-milk cheeses, Navajo rugs,
her reading aloud from a Dictionary of Drugs –

she made wine of almost everything.

How many of those she found on the street
and fetched back to her attic room –

to promise nothing, to take nothing for granted –

how many would hold by the axiom
she would intone as though it were her mantra?

I could name names. I could be indiscreet.