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.

Now, A Sonnet

There's nothing there we haven't seen before,
But not so many times we can afford 
To hustle past. Let's promise each other --
Never commit the sin of being bored.
Besides, so much has changed in just a year.
The sun-rustled air seems even clearer.
The pattern of the leaves left in the trees
(Yes, the postcard days ended yesterday),
Suggests paragraphs full of ideas,
Things we think but never think to say.
The colors play the least part of the scene,
And we must grant each leaf its final bow.
If we could stay to watch the last careen
To the ground, we might settle then at Now.

Allegory, Sonnet #621

Notice with what swift skill 

the wave dives on its side 

to escape the rolling mill 

of the incoming tide. 

Sloped beaches elide 

the surf’s distended plight 

to the sandpiper’s delight. 

When the oceans deepen 

and our shores sink from sight, 

when powerful tides bend 

toward dry land and kill 

what no man could defend, 

we’ll call that an evil 

and pray, “Moon, make an end.”

Our Winter

Mid-January and winter has arrived at last.

The branches droop beneath the snow of two

storms.  No bird has sung for us in weeks.

I have read of winters so cold, so long,

the birds fell like leaves from the trees;

always war is raging nearby or the smoke

of the crematorium has smeared the snow like

a gray, vague and indecipherable rubbing.

No bird in my backyard falls from a branch

that doesn’t catch the air beneath its wings

and swoop off into the wind with a kind of

triumph.  I have never been shot at either.

And yet, not forty miles from here a man

was dismembered and his body parts used

in a ritual with no better purpose than

the resurrection of some long dead devil.

In the next county, a girl of sixteen was

hog-tied and set on fire by two brothers

who confessed she had teased them with her

body.  One brother accused the other

of dancing to the rhythm of her screams.

And so, each day, I watch the birds.  This

morning, a cardinal sat hunched on a limb—

as if I’d mistake him for a bloody fist.

Ephemera

How many evenings in ten years;

Most spent — reading aloud, listening —

Trying to be conscious of their joy?

Today one child is still only ten.

The other is only, still only five.

Time disappears into their growing.

Sometimes you think that even

To be conscious is not enough —

Then you despair, like a castaway,

Fingers cupped on the sea’s edge,

Afraid to sip when it is the whole sea

You are dying, dying to drink.

I and It

Nothing nature does rests in archives

we can look up and read again unless

it is what we remember of our lives

and see within and do not have to guess

what has happened under some duress.

What seems natural is not always wise.

Gun, Sonnet #620

A half-dressed man once pointed his gun

At me from an upper floor window

In the street: “Hey, kid, want some fun!”

He laughed. For a moment I didn’t know

Who I was — not until he disappeared.

Nothing had happened, something feared,

Because the child’s world I knew

Had never been so wrenched askew. 

Even so, I ran home, my lungs bursting,

Shouting with joy — no, then cursing,

Crying, tears stinging, feeling shame

For which I’ve never found a name.

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