The Speed of Light
We can’t say Truth, now. We can’t
make singular, or one, what is
privatized. But isn’t light,
in the distance, on a fog-thick night
where damp makes cold
colder, real? In the distance,
the colored light
of a gray house fills out
four over four glass panels and
to the smoker and the dog walker
is agreeable. Truth: We agree
about the speed of light because
it has a number value. We’ve learned
about how, to travel at that rate
would bring a girl out from,
and back to, Earth, younger
than her classmates left behind,
they, aged and gawking, deciding
whether to envy or pity this child
who cannot go back to childhood. Here,
she finds drones and phones
beaming blue light across a spectrum
of believed things. She would like to
go back to an old glow. She remembers
the table lamps in her living room
as a child (in body and time). The lamps flanked
the sofa beneath the deep bay
window. If she couldn’t get a seat
beside her mother while she read aloud
she would climb inside the windowsill
and look over Mama’s head, down
to the sketchy illustrations
of giant people and peaches. But
it’s the light she wants to hold again,
from the lamps. She’d tap the warm pad
of any fingertip to the brassy body of the lamp and
the bulb glowed, a little. A second tap made things
brighter and one more touch
would set the whole room burning —
whichever children in the windowsill
made present to whomever (a smoker or a dog walker)
passed in the night. She wants to know, now,
how the skin told the lamp told the bulb
to pace itself —
to illuminate the dark in stages,
to prevent a shock.
Truth has sometimes
come to me this way,
not moving at its own speed, but mine.
First, at a slant.
Then, face first. Then,
crushing, lovely, reflective, not travelling anywhere,
at any speed, just holding.
* * * * *
William and the Fox
From the den, where spines
of linen books shine from wear, and piles
of drafts live on tables by a record player,
crackling and skipping, he watches
a fox. From her neat teeth
dangles a limpid mouse.
He would like to believe that
the fox and the mouse are one —
circle of life and all —
that the rain needs our pity and
our submission. As the buffalo nods
to the grass, he nods. Tomorrow he will
garden with the tenderness of
the pink tulips’ petals.
But when he hears love,
he writes an image
of anisette cookies lined-up
in straight rows, lit-up
by sugar and color,
behind curved glass casing.
Then, from above, comes
one cookie announcing itself
with the sound of waxed paper. Behind
the paper hovers
the pinched brim of a wool cap.
And everything smells like his father.
And he cannot forgive the fox.