The traveller is a ghost
touching at the landscape
                    a premonition
          insubstantial                    transparent
drinking in the trees
          the broken picket fence
          the laundry frozen on a winter          line

          (the clothes will be propped by a fire
               later,
          another ghost — a pair of trousers
          standing at attention
                    but melting back
          into the wetness it tried hopeless to flee)

The mist sweeps
   the cold expanse

it is perhaps the breath of all who
   came to leave

   but stayed in memory at least

not knowing that to touch
   is to contaminate

      and that contamination
      cuts both ways 

(via weissewiese)