Nocturne

Night, only barely. The shadow
of a bird has just tucked itself
into yonder branches. A black
feral cat skulks his way behind
the hydrangeas, which soon
will bloom. My fingers
are blistered; I pulled weeds
and embryonic oak trees
from behind those bushes
all day. I don’t own this place.
I pay a woman I’ve never met
for the right to sit on this porch
with a fan and a citronella candle,
trying to determine if I can call
the blue before me bejeweled
by the streetlight’s steady shine.
It reminds me of a painting I saw
long ago in Paris. A nocturne
in pastels, streetlights recasting
evening into a smeary, spectral
green. And I remember a friend,
when she was a friend, telling me
she loved that painting too,
and this made me feel
connected and possessive and
so sure we should be friends.
We were poets, in love
with misfortune and error,
in love, we thought, with death.
We weren’t. We were sad
young women drawn
to certain shades of blue,
the ones as close as possible
to being something else
without forfeiting their place
in blue’s family. We thought
we were becoming, back then,
something else, more ourselves,
or whoever we thought we wanted
to be. Poor ghosts. Then, as we are
now. Alive in the dark, spotlit
by the dying fires
of lightning bugs, the sense
of having lost something
we never really had. But
I know that now
as much as anyone knows it
or can. That feral cat
used to sleep here, on a patio chair,
legs tucked under, like a loaf.
But then I changed
the furniture, and now he just
walks by or sits across the street
and stares, eyes like radium
clockfaces against the black
of his coat, the night. And
my friend? I don’t know.
We haven’t spoken
in years.