Summer of '65

Sur la Plage, Juan-les-Pins

So white the sun,

the dog turds on the beach steps

are bleached white

and in our little boat

when my toes touched

your white suit

Ah non! you said

You’ll make it dirty.

Yet after forty years she will have become old, like her Spanish grandmother who came with us to watch the fireworks from the beach. Not long ago, I found a picture of her father, standing next to a race car in the pits at LeMans, wearing his work clothes and a tweed cap, a study in gray and white. It was taken the summer I knew her, when the sun had burnt the pattern of my sandals into my feet so dark you could see it for months afterward