Summer afternoon, Henry James said,
the most beautiful words in the language.
I wonder if he saw those summer afternoons

in California when the fog
sneaks in like a man with something
to hide. Sometimes he stays the night, sometimes

he’s gone by dusk, the guilty lover who takes
his hands from a woman’s face just in time
to get home for supper, though he’s forgotten

the telltale signs, that he’s left behind
a scarf, a glove, wisps of himself
for her to remember. Climbing a foggy hill

I thought the lover must be Japanese
he’d left such elegant drawings—a bridge,
the long hair of willows, a garden of black ink

traced on a lavender sky. He might have been
a lover I had once, a continent away. Each day
he’d face the red persimmon of the rising sun and dream

of home, though he went on making music
in his head. Each night he played a Chopin nocturne.
the passage where the music wavers like a face