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Hazel Hawthorne Werner at Provincetown, 1953

The world simplified through a revision of three
planes, a geometry made horizontally plain
and true — green, pink, and blue.

We see what, in the summer of fifty-three,
you saw from the primal wind-battered shack
through wavy salt-glazed glass, cataracts

under the shuttering roof,
rented for seventy-five a month flat.
The sea is the field of pink from margin

to margin, but with increments of blue
stretched flat, sponging dusk’s pink hue.
And the low dune—a gentle chartreuse;

you walked through it, to the vacant beach,
pristine except that once—when it was strewn
with a cargo of oranges, all edible and good.

(After Wolf Kahn’s Pink Light on the Sea and accounts of Hazel Hawthorne Werner’s first shack at Provincetown, MA.)