Cabriolet

You’re the man

on the seventh

floor, who has seldom

ventured past

the city limits,

who drives a

bronze convertible

every summer, never

unfolds its top,

shielded from the

world by tinted

windows; beams of

glowing Helios

sheathed in shade,

with no one to eye

the welling in your

ponds of obsessive

sight;

none to note the shine

upon your scalp

(the blond of

halcyon summers

long since gone);

none to hear the

Requiem

by Fauré, booming

from your speakers

as a dirge,

while you circle the

cul-de-sac, up to

one hundred

times,

the one that borders the

beach, spying every woman

on the sand, those who

lay like sirens

by the shale—but not with a

primal leer, rather

watching for your

wife between the

waves, like the day she

leaped in light, further

from the shore she’d

ever been,

you in your Pontiac

Solstice, its retractable roof

down for the afternoon,

while you sat in front of

the radio

in a trance, never looking

up

while she waved her

flailing arms amid the

surge, Good Vibrations 

blasting

as an anthem—

for the season

set to fall, like grains

in the top of a glass

that weighs our seconds—

so diaphanous,

so shapely

in the sun’s

incessant dazzle.                 

Andreas Gripp

August 18, 2025

RF Image