Miracles Of Light,

10/2018

I told you last night in bed — we are right here in the middle of our lives. You said — yes — and I reached out to touch you, but my hand landed heavy and strangely on your side. You said — ow — but you didn’t mean it, even though my hand landed on the place where you are all taped up to bandage over your port.

I should say it in the past tense, because by now you are already healed. Because it arrived.

I asked you once — what exactly had arrived? The information, unbidden — you said — it just arrived. That you are well — you said — that I am perfect and well and now my body has to catch up with my soul — you said.

Every day that year you placed your magic cancer pill on top of my head, and I closed my eyes and pictured you and the spot in your lungs, sparkling with a crystal light that spread around you, but careful to keep you here and earth-bound. You believed I helped to save your life.

I sent my picture of you out through the top of my head, just like you were in your dream, holding that roll of tin foil like a scepter. And walking on the water — you said. Yes — I said — walking on the water.

We say the sun rises, but we are actually falling continuously through nothing, rotating through darkness. We spin and only sometimes catch ourselves in this magnetic light. The light begins in darkness, sound begins in the absence of sound, being in non-being, and once there is more than one thing, suddenly there is everything.

Maybe from the darkest perspective out there it sees us sitting at this or that cafe, sparkling, our faces shining, our spoons glinting, our coffee trembling in our cups, our fragile gestures, our rings radiating light. Then the sun is high enough over our table, over our street, over the east coast, over the hemisphere, and finally high enough to warm us.

You wake just in time for dawn, when no-one else sees the blue light marking the edge of the horizon, like a curtain’s edge before rising on a stage, the entire day waiting for you beyond the dark. The first hour that mimic’s moonlight with beads of dew still clinging to the flats of leaves and tendrils and stems — the oven of life cooking on low.

I’ll wake at the shift of weight on your side of the mattress as you pull on your jeans and socks waiting beside you on the floor. I will not catch you, but only see the covers thrown back on your side of our bed. They wait for me to remake when I rise — you tricked me into believing that was how you knew daily that I loved you.

I am always surprised that you are gone. At what ungodly hour did you rise and descend the steep attic stairs so silently? You will have started the world for me to wake in below — turned up the thermostat, made the coffee, and you are busily ordering the world. Just in case.

This full moon night light seemingly comes from nowhere, is a reflection of a ball of fire. A cold, refracted light of a rock circling another rock, and only occurs when the timing is perfect.

On this dim stage small shapes scuttle rustling leaves. The squirrels know it when it hits their path and worms its way in between well-trod branches. The birds sleep with one eye open, the glow making their feathers shine. The light is playing tricks, shortening and stunning, stretching and sighing. It expands the stillness of the backyard, and the branches in the center of the tree.

A light blinks on inside the kitchen downstairs and spreads a sheet of golden squares across the field of white. It catches flakes of snow that are falling, sparkling, miraculous at first, but soon heavy and no longer radiant. The light is now diffused by clouds and seems to emanate from nowhere. The shed is lit from within, the pruned hydrangeas lit from within, the slowly folding walkway lit from within, the last cat left out sits perfectly satisfied in the corner next to the back porch, waiting; he is also lit from within and his eyes flutter and dance.

In the morning the first gold rays cut like swords through the night’s work. All of the blue light laid down so carefully, and now the buttery glow falls into the simple paw tracks that circle the trunk of the tree, melting it by drops.