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.