Late at night
Late at night long lamps throw deep yellow light across water rippling broadly. The leading edge of the wavelets carry the light toward you in diminishing stacks, prepared and spread out across the horizon from a distant source. In deep night the city is all reflective, covered in damp skins and open windows and dim recessed mirrors in barely dark corners. You no longer see your impermanent body floating ahead of you only darkness. But you are reproduced everywhere and beyond in the tiny reflections of dewy coats and the prismatic waves of brackish dark water. You cannot see anything, buried in time and dust. The lights of her apartment sink into near darkness. She sees you. Early in the day, stepping out of the sea, now in the darkness, across the glossy walls of her apartment. From beneath the kitchen table, where she curls on her coat she sees past the empty living room through open doors to your face, green with sea lights, filling the bathroom mirror, looming from the door, or the courtyard, or from a distance, or from the past.