Lighght

A beam of light cutting the skin of space

travels at the speed of time to the beginning,

the end of things, seeing everything between,

without being seen.

Or a single photon released into a sphere

lined with silver, instantaneously covering

all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,

as if someone might see.

It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,

a point on a continuum proliferating one day

to saturate the universe with something better

than gas, heat, matter. 

It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor

at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter 

shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.

It is promiscuous,

infecting its neighbors, or looking to.

It stretches across the sky like an eyelid

and proliferates color like a drug dream.

It splits the prism

into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,

blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white; 

it is nothing at all—

until it strikes something.

With a bow to Aram Saroyan, who wrote the title in 1965.