The Singer in the Café

She stood, a tall half-child, thin as a breath,
a face as white as a cloud at noon,
a profile cut from polished shell.
I saw there was something strange in her eyes.
	
She bent over her guitar’s neck,
carefully picked out a form of sound
in which she placed her voice as far 
as nearness is when love is found.

It was as though she had lost nothing.
Polite,
she did not insist. She offered free
what she had found in the warm night:

a thing as small as it was bright
in the forgotten light of her desire,
a shy truth tempered in 
a dark fire.

At the end, she bowed, smiling radiantly
toward the rising waters of applause,
then, bending down, after a quiet pause,
from the floor, raised her white cane carefully.


Footprints in the Sand

On the rumpled beach
two perfect prints
where a little girl briefly stood,
with a hint of defiance
in the angle 
of the delicate hollows
perfectly delineated among diminutive dunes
smeared like sandy paint
with a palette knife.
And then she dashed away.
But Robinson missed his Friday,
and I kick myself for my typical absent-mindedness.

They would have made a perfect photograph,
those small prints on the beach:
a poetic composition
rich with symbolic meaning
to frame and hang above a mantle	
or in a discreet hallway.  
But the only camera I brought
is the one that darkens this page.

I smell clam shells, ozone, wood fires.
I see beachcombers like scattered crumbs,
the evening turn the sun into woven glass.

And kick myself again
as I am immersed in the shadows of the night.

And I imagine her say,
that young girl where she pauses,
or perhaps she just thinks it:
How far does the horizon go
beyond the edge of the sea?
There, there I’ll go! . . .
before jetting off in her madcap 
dash across the sand.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.