With night fallen, I watch from my front step
the corner streetlight that seems to hover, illuming
nothing but a few passing cars and the neighbor
across the street who descends her driveway
to walk her dog. The American flag
silhouettes the blank green stucco wall
of her newly-painted house. She fades down
a lane immersed in the amber halos of other
streetlights. Some recess of my mind
considers for a moment what women
who live alone do with their money
or their bodies, believe interior decorators
design for them décors of classical solitude.
A Pacific breeze rustles the night-dark
nimbus of camphor trees as she returns
upstreet, her ungainly shadow laboring up
her driveway. The sound of her door,
as it shuts, impels with it the utterance
of her last footstep, and the snap of the flag
still waiting to be folded at nightfall.
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