Timothy Sandefur

Vanished

Her eyes are what I remember most:
candid, azure, corners almost
concealed by her caramel hair,

they flared

like flames above each guarded smile;
smooth arms gestured, soothing while
indulging a clumsy boy his crude clichés.

In a blueing sky the full moon rose,
ash-grey.

I treasure, too, a fragment of her laugh
(the sound hushed long ago) from that last
night.  We stopped for ice cream (cherry, I recall)
on the way back home from the concert hall.

She turned her head slightly to the right,
in the twilight.

That’s all I’ve left for sure. The rest
is something less than memory: letters lost;
a glimpse of a picture that I once found
of another life
(mother, wife)

on the opposite side of this round
planet. That and rumors and images
that fade, 

as shadows always do,
into shade.

Timothy Sandefur is an attorney practicing law in Phoenix, and also the author of several books including biographies of Frederick Douglass and Jacob Bronowski, and a book of poems called Some Notes on the Silence.