In this calm and reckless light, high noon, this friend and I lean on parked cars and talk. How odd to meet like this after years apart like comrades from a fifties' commune. His casual frown is a cop's who knows the law and has it on his side, his meaty grip a handshake that takes his fist away from the pistol he might have worn in Tombstone low on his hip a hundred years ago. Tinted glass at the bank bakes us blind in such fierce light, a shimmering glint.
Cars oxidize, and bodies melt.
Leaning, we squint, awkward that little's changed. Talk turns to cars and football, grandsons and the awful need for water, the flood one summer in college, thunder that year that rattled glass. We stay away from sex and singles bars, bold coeds we both wanted, politics at noon too hot for a fistfight. He goes to church the old way and gets around to asking, like a man in town for the day, puzzled, wondering why we left. It calls down doom, but I tell him we've found grace.