Winter Oranges

We sit, strangers, at the familiar table
Set with winter oranges, your mother's moon-shaped cup.
Picture of three sisters embracing between wars,
And the plate with flamboyants flowering over Mediterranean blue,
Now the mandarin politeness,
Pouring of coffee, breaking of Lindt,
Icy tick of a dead man's clock echoing the solitude
We share and, overlying it all,
That perturbed, pearl-in-the-oyster quality about you
As, phrase by phrase, I recite
The never-ending sentence from which we erase ourselves.
How difficult, my love, to separate
The silence of what need not be said from the silence
Of what cannot.

~ L.S. Asekoff
The New Yorker
Jan. 19, 1987 (pg 34)