I am thinking of you in that city of sunflowers,

in that city where abandoned rowboats
sink beneath the weight of peeling paint
and the absence of tourists. In the streets,
a smattering of commerce continues:
exchange of vegetables and fish
wrapped in discarded pages of news.
Nights still heralded by the musked
notes of trumpet flowers; afternoons,
by endless arguments between rain and fog.
You recede sometimes like a figure
in a dark raincoat, and sometimes return
like a resinous emulsion of pine. Far
from erasing your features, time
has chiseled them into sharper relief;
this is how I know even now it is claiming
you for itself, in all the ways I never could.