The End of the Visit

On my last day, we came back after a late lunch, the stone pavers

of the promenade cutting a straight line between rows

of midcentury glass condos, until a misjudged wall blocked the vista

above the sea, unless you knew to enter the unassuming stairwell

to the left, as you did, pressing your hand into my back 

as we rose to that spot you had shown me years before:

the breakers beyond the wall, the cliff formations on either side,

the sea folded into a Fibonacci shell of green scarab and lapis lazuli,

the sun descending to its midsummer curtain of centered fire.

It was there you told me the news—and the waves fell away, 

and a panel of scabbed concrete rose in their place, partly rendered

in gray spray paint over red graffito and black graffito,

a languid palimpsest whose translation into human meaning

I would never complete. I had crumpled to the steps,

and the world had bleared, and you granted me a reckoning

with what others would learn a year later, after you’d gone, 

and then you raised me up to look at the sea again, sunset now,

and nothing  jeweled, just a stanched bleeding of revenant light,

but I understood, and leaned against you, and knew the wisdom

of the beetling waves and the lucid way you stood dry-eyed

beside me in my tears, motioning to something falling from the sky.