it went, the argument
ripped out with the phone.

What’s left – one dish of smear,
a sardine skeleton.

Don’t bother asking the agent.
She has no opinion, in her kid coat

with her strangely burned fingers,
and so thin it may be she, too, eats

only by repute. Ask yourself, rather,
where is the flue for that rumour,

the one about a sister
and her brother’s flight, his halt

 in a dark-eyed European wood?
The sun’s inventory reads: room.

The agent pales at the window,
fades into a forest of light without

access to the particulars
for living off seeds, small kills,

alone in the out-there-somewhere
like a call-centre operative on Jupiter.