Noir

It’s early, yet the day’s dwindled into pieces.

Night came fast, sucked all the light from flowers in the park.

Green is gone for now, replaced by light’s orphans who know

no windows.

These sidewalks straight as Kansas with misspelled ancestors’ scrawled

across stained concrete in Polish, Navajo, Finnish and Romanian.

As the slivered moon escapes its lair, he can’t stop thinking of her,

her thick brown hair, the skin on her arms, the way she sat under the tree,

liquid amber he believes.

Even gas stations won’t take this pocket of counterfeit coins under their acres

of neon glare, that sputtering cloud of insects, those sodden leaves.

Parking the car with its empty tank on a street aching in the quiet, he re-ties

his shoe laces and sets out into the black. It’s dank as a steam bath.

A drizzle turns to rain, descent of holy water from a foreign home dumping

cold under unforgiving sky.

This gray dome, blind and deaf to all he’s been afraid to ask. A cracked

cell phone forsaken on the curb.