I meant to tell you & now I never will

“California is a tragic country - like Palestine,
like every Promised Land.”
                                                          ―Christopher Isherwood

The late afternoon wind comes in off the water
quite possibly bells
                              ringing somewhere
as you & I turn to stagger
                                                back across the sand

& your soul (if it even exists
I couldn’t say if any of us for certain but
something in the air anyway
besides this damp gray compression of sunlight
reaching down to rap its knuckles against the waves

But it’s night now, nearly night
& the invocation is a rocking number
conceptually challenged
the irrevocable left unspoken as contrast
spanning the pure instruments of sunset
on a street that was named for
1000 hungry ghosts

& meanwhile no one knows us
                              or who we might have been
had the sun lingered just a split-
second longer
                                                above the edge of the sea