To retreat into silence – but not my own silence. The silence of images, of another’s carefully tended garden, front or back.
To retreat, retrieve, re-tread. To treat each word as a revelation, a piece of the greater silence.
To retreat, but not to withdraw. To be that mote in your eye, that skip on your mental compact disc.
To retreat into the thick of things: new fields, full of unknown flowers. Into forest and thicket, unfamiliar trees alive with unknown birds.
To re-treat with ice cream, with mangos, with passion fruit. To treat each other: would that make it double-Dutch? A confusion of tongues and jumpropes.
To retreat in order to engage. First to take leave (of what?) and only afterwards to greet, face to face.