It’s the streetlamp light we all know here
In America land
Where the pavements meet;
The shadowed porch and the windows lit
Like liquor bottle glass,
Amber and blue,
Furtive motion like rumors inside,
And the lamp lit corner where she waited
And waited as a child for you
Then stumbled home at last
Past her world she thought she knew
The shape of her diminishments in view
And wept, plain girl, into a grimy fist.
Now slaps the screen door in the August heat
And a man steps out to contemplate
The tipping of the Earth
Into another fall.
He’s lived there long enough to know
Where all of summers’ dramas ghosts will go
As you, grown gaunt in solitude,
And she have gone,
And about the murmur in the leaves
Of that dread season coming on.
So he turns inside again to sleep
Beyond the windows amber and blue
And leaves behind the lamp lit stage
Where she waited and waited
And waited as a child for you.
