Her face, since colorized, still burns my eyes:
_           _ eye-green and hair-red gently bled
to the same gray by black-and-white, and blurred

on screen by Vaseline on the camera
_           _ lens.  Or so runs this urban myth of fuzz
and luminosity.  Her teeth gleam screen-worthy

white, abut against the abyss of her open
_           _ mouth, which houses a swallowing
black.  Nelson Eddy will soon arrive,

beneath her window, to intercept
_           _ her high note, to call her, wrongly,
Blueyes.  I wait and wait impatiently

for the one who will come for me,
_           _ as Nelson will appear, magnificently,
and expose L.A. living rooms in their matinee

to his crashing Au revoir, Rose Marie!
_           _ But first, shining from the window
and screen, there flashes the glass—

our signal scudding pixels—
_           _ light flooding Jeanette’s lips
so first out and under I’ll go,

_                                               _ ~

since soon I’ll be ten again, and doing again

what I really should not, with a boy
_           _ (he was twelve, his name was Scott)
and a magnifying glass, under a bush in my backyard,

and soon we’ll be caught and caught very hard, but not before
_           _ we learn how to make night simply,
scrambling and splaying under some shrubbery,

and not before we find that even beneath
_           _ that bubble of lens, the leaves bleed
their green to shade, and the plump raspberries

lose their red, and not before we turn the lens
_           _ to the diminishing colors
of so many withins:  pockets and tank-tops

and dropping-down seams.  Mostly not before:
_           _ I find how to lie back in that scratchy pithed night
and Scott’s lens finds one shaft of light

from down the shifting tree, and plays its vanishing
_           _ radius rainbow, and mostly not before
the light finds me.

_                                               _ ~

Au revoir, Rose Marie!  and then the parting and the flood
_           _ —all the light and still no colors—just the mud
beneath the nails, and just the not-night ground,

and baths and living room scales—

_                                               _ ~

So now, obscenely, when I see
_           _ the heady close-up of any Rose Marie,
she has Scott in her teeth,

his towel her fringed handkerchief,
_           _ his clear glass lens swelling the note
that saw his safe passage from the city

center to the fringe of Los Angeles:
_           _ the beach.  The ocean splashes sand on sand,
foams green at his feet, stung red

by the wind.  Seaweed sprawls in the draw.
_           _ He slaps his board down on its shadow.
He balances black, breaches in.