her face

how wrong his selfish eyes
the wonderful day-place
lost again to dusk
the breeze of many voiced loves
all night how the dead argued
while he imagined her face
azure in Africa’s patchwork of flames

writers

many cruel words
behind sunglasses
sunglasses America loved
lost in Summer's orange music
where writers sketched women
in forgotten books
where writers sketched women
on warm afternoons
where writers
trapped in dead realities
of castigated sentences
sketched women in the rain

it was a different kind of seeing

peering into remnants of things-as-they-are
he found and sometimes saw born

places between places
moments rippling into years

he watched dark roads thread off into fields
he fathered frail trees

and after he’d gone
only sunshine shone

deep into the interstices
of where he had been