Reading a Friend in London

Comforting. I pot-lucked a magazine
about sadness in fences, found your name
dangling by an odd number.

It was not like any other page:
your hand reached out to pat mine
and it didn’t matter

that I knew not one person in a thousand
by name, because here was a friend
in a library of people ignoring

each other and looking for a poem
like this one, which would justify
them sitting inside

looking at the bleached Southbank,
rather than sitting outside
laughing.

*

Like a Shepardess,
I’d have known it was yours
before reading the contributors.

It makes me think of my friend Urmy,
a year in situ: two migratory birds
meeting then forgetting,

but at once knowing each others voice,
walking together
synchronized as two wings.