Vivacious sun
voluptuous sea
honey light
rainy breeze.

Distantly,
down a hill
and up another,
down again

the roads like compressed ribbon,
clouds like the countries of Europe

are casting the city -
of Poles,
of Irish,
of freed slaves -
into shadow.

Adumbral city,
pellucid breeze,
pewter light,
the world of shifting names.

~

My friend’s girl. Sitting on the porch with Baltimore behind her under a floe of tenebrous clouds. We are drinking in the heat, listening to sirens. We are elevated. She tells us about friends from home, friends whose names I forget. Names without bodies, without memories, are the emptiest vessels known to man. Less defined even than death, which saunters in with the fecund rain breeze. Sheets draping the city; our bodies - languid with alcohol, sinewy and tan - still inside sun. Her friends were driving through the night, returning from a trip. Speeding excessively, anxious for bed, for a cup of coffee, to check their email, to call their mother, to look at pictures of an ex-girlfriend and masturbate. Anxious for home. Somehow, they clip the median. The car flips and spirals like a gymnast. The car almost manages grace. The driver, who is not wearing his seat belt, is crushed and dies instantly. His girlfriend, seated beside him, walks away uninjured (a funny term, really). In the back seat, the third passenger is asleep, reclined. His body shatters the back windshield and falls onto the highway. His clothes are incinerated from the friction of his momentum on the pavement. His stomach is ripped open. The paramedics find him, barely alive, trying to gather the contents of his belly. His entrails. Trying to piece himself back together. He dies surrounded by the faces of people he has never seen. The storm sweeps over us and we run inside. We pour more drinks. This is not my friend’s first girl. It will not be his last. She has her arm around his waist and she looks happy. I begin talking to a woman in a dress the color of flowering marigolds.