Soiled sunshine on lawns and walls,
the horizon-line melancholy,
the mystery cults of interiors,
the parlor, bedroom, luncheonette,
the worship of empty spaces,
the scummed-over good cheer
of brickface and clapboard.

Our optimism’s a darkening soul
that doesn’t know the dark is coming.
The windows inflect an ethic of the watched,
the overseen, the secretive: the hidden lives
of architectures, the boxcars, factories,
variety stores, and gabled homes
where life went silent a moment ago.

A woman’s Coca-Cola-red pumps,
a moralistic lighthouse, a feral Buick grill,
the arid creamy bumpy wet light.
Our godless churchy solemnities.
Austerity’s rapture. Each of us unreachable.
Wind and sand our silenced voluptuaries.
A woman in a slip on a plank of the sun.