This evening starts without fanfare.
A sheet metal sky invents us in a
palette of gray-blues and muted greens
as if we inhabit rooms full of cigar smoke.
Couples on benches sit stenciled against
the bay, their stillness is a photograph
mounted and hung in a glass frame.
The wind blows half-smoked cigarettes
between the wharf boards, a woman
catches them, stumbling in the tide—
her eyes have no color, teeth like
faded tungsten. Even the lit cherry
flares like a scene in a Billy Wilder flick:
a hot and colorless fleck in the shadows.
The scene turns. Now wharf lights go
flickering down the platform in a panoply
of blue electric arcs. Sea lions bark in
the cross-piles and octopuses whipsaw
from their depths. Our eyes blink in
sapphire codes, the lights invent us anew.
It is what we’ve been longing for: to
wake in bluish colors and drink and
laugh and screw in that neo-noir glow
beneath a blanket in the still-warm sand.
