On Small Talk

& anyway, what good is the metronomic
one-note canon two house sparrows cant
aloft, between, the pine privacy fence,
if not to simulate estrangement?
 
Watching them watching me, I think,
First impressions are so medieval. O, to be
the provincial drawbridge damming
a ramshackle interior, or the alligator-
green moat babbling sparsely beneath it—
 
all the unknowable utterances one cheeps
forth to be peripherally endeared. A chorus
which, at the moment, I take to mean
 
Friend, you look well from this distance,
from my vantage, perched over here.