Light
An echo from when the world went dark
In December, the darkest month, I made it my project to record the light each day. I share it now, in celebration of the solstice, of the longest days of light.
The important thing is light. See light
make light shape light bend it into spheres
as heaven’s hot bodies form in the void
take on the light.
Learning to Paint
D. A. Powell
I write to no one but the light, bruised, yellow, consumptive. I am willing to risk infection of whatever plagues the light. The air burned my nostrils but I felt sun on my face. This morning I watched the clouds, lingered outside of time, and counted three planes in the sky.
Standing outside of baggage claim, my luggage looked damp. Gingerly, I touched both, they’d somehow deepened color in flight. Take three deep breaths. Stand firm on your feet. The light has left already. This seems a fruitless exercise, but I am keeping my promise.
The yellow light queasily crowns the tree, I love it all the same. Gold has thinned into hollow yellow, the final thrashes of a patient in a sickbed, a funeral pallor. Winter’s light has yet to come, the brilliant shocking shine, the glare relief of the relics of the naked branches.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be surprised? To be targeted by unexpected delight? It slips through my fingers hides behind dishes, undusted corners and mismatched socks. When it comes for me, I will not shriek. I will do my best to be a worthy recipient, a gracious hostess, take out the glasses reserved for company, write out place cards, and set the table for twelve. The branches shake by an unseen hand. Shaker, I urge you, loosen your grip.
Cold banging on the window pane, two lit candles sit beside me, I am the offering splayed upon the altar. People pass shoulders hunched, bodies tight, constricted by the cold. The cocktail shaker cracks ice sharp.
A lady’s sheer scarf blows in the wind, the Empire State Building’s spiral is lit blue, and I pass the lot where we bought our Christmas tree last year, the one I flocked with baby’s breath.
I could have only fallen in love in summer, I walk too quickly in the cold. I know better than to attribute all of life to the seasons, but it’s all I have. Do I remember the sound of spring’s siren call? Was it so cold last winter?
Two logs burn in a fireplace. I remember the first time I took you here. A mistake, the light had just turned long.
The room is lit by sun without stream. The light is diffused, indirect, half shaded by thin clouds, lighting the dark wood gradient of the desk. No glare. A quiet, unobtrusive presence, shy, soft, not puddled, but gathered. Enough to see by, but not enough to absorb, to heat. A pragmatist, to keep me company, a quiet reminder, it will be dark so soon in these short days.
The light of August is golden and godly, quickened by humid air, lush, heavy is the head that wears the golden crown, rising from baked concrete, stretching late and long. Sexy, sticky, swollen, pregnant light, nothing like January’s steely flint. The light in August does not pinch, but it can engulf, and often blinds, stumbling out of the darkened theater into dilated light.
One empty side of the diner’s good booth. Two gnarled gourds sit out of season on the window sill. Muted mustard seats. A knotted blind hangs crooked on the window. On the table, a green and white porcelain cup sits in a stained saucer, refilled three times, now empty. The iced tea tastes sweeter this morning.
I lingered, you left. A black and white dalmatian with a red leash sashays across the street. I fear scattered thoughts, meaningless observations.
I want to lie, to infer the other patron’s lives. Did they fuck this morning? Did they make their bed? Did they lie in it? Are they in love? What time does the sun fill their apartments? Do they fear overhead light?
The 4:30 sunset?
Do they dance? Do they tiptoe?
Do they rent? Do they own?
I want a story to hold to, for the champagne to never go flat. Still thinking of the woman we could not make sense of in the newstore, smoking a cigarette inside, but sane, with glitter spackled under her eyes, talking to the man selling Monday’s New York Times, speaking like familiar strangers.
The light finds the three white calla lilies flowers I laid out for it. I run from room to room, racing the light. Every cloud becomes a crime. I woke up this morning, and for the first time with bare trees, I could see the sunrise over the city.
I did not meditate, in silence, I scrubbed and scoured, ruined a cabinet mistaking white peeled paint for accumulated dirt. I clean in silence.
This morning, a grandmother in a white hat with a fur trim and matching boots pushed a stroller. Last night, alone in the kitchen, I sang Happy Birthday to my own. To write this feels like a betrayal, a cheap use of grief.
My grandmother cleaned the house with the music on. My mother, consumed, would scrub everything but the bathroom to Patsy Cline. You did not know what baseboards were. I once did not know walls could get dirty.
I’ve heard that an obsession with cleanliness is a fear of death. I counter that it’s a sign of a belief in the potential for the immaculate, the pristine. The light comes in and has something to shine on. I’m only a disciple of the light, reverently tending to the corpse.
Outside, the first flurries of the season. I choose one and watch it descend. I give the same attention, tracking, tracing all sky-born things – raindrops, airplanes, birds. The flurries will not stick, stack, pile. Accumulate, the unit by which we measure. I confuse the trickling water sound of the heat running through the pipes for the sound of thaw, but there’s not enough snow to melt.
The sky is shaded gray, textureless white, the kind that hurts my eyes and wrinkles my brow. The color of the calla lilies on my desk is the same white void as the sky. I fear the darkness to come, that even if I had the light of all the candles in the world, the dark would still descend. Rain falls, darkness descends.
My wool coat makes it so that I slide in my side with every stop. The man holding his bike by its red handlebars had a tire pop, loud as a gunshot; I could barely catch my breath, on instinct, ducked my head beneath my hand. He apologized for the faulty tire, he’d just gotten it fixed. For a moment, before we were above ground, in darkness, all passengers fixed their attention to a single source of sound.
Barefoot, standing on a green velvet couch that was once mine, I roll up the window shade by hand. Its tethered string would not pull itself taught like the others; it blocked the light until I rolled it up, and folded into itself neatly. Now the light stretches across the basement – illuminates a green paper crane on the window sill, a line of cans all half-full but gone flat.
The crackle of the fire can not drown the wind’s screaming whistle. The wind sounds like a downpour, the embers crack blue and gold like the light before it, brilliant, stark and still.
This morning, I woke up to shining light. I don’t remember the dark striking me so deeply last winter. Deeply is not the word I want – warped, blurred, disoriented – each rings true.
I am not interested in martyrdom; I kicked the habit, poured wine on the funeral pyre, and kicked off my shoes to dance in bare, bloodied feet. Once, I took a dance class and left long lines of blood on the hardwood floors, but this story bores me now. Time to cast off the familiar crutch for plain-spoken pain.
The sun must have left at the same time; darkness must have come too early, but I didn’t notice, ensconced in a womb of early loft love. I was too busy taking baths and peeling carrots for soup. Last winter, I had a stockpile of sun from the summer I spent tanning. This summer, I no longer cared about my tan, or my nails I kept so distinctly decorated that I could use them to keep time.
I shed my claws when life got laborsome; I had to use my hands, fashion a different armor, and keep time by a different clock.
Delineate the lines we draw to distinguish. Fixated by the ruler's straight line, the word conjures a good, clean break. I am still young enough to believe in the possibility of a clean break, in an immaculately kept home, in no scuff marks on the tile floor.
How can I argue for straight lines when I can’t even tell time? When I’m capable of losing all understanding of sequence? When I am so surprised by the sudden dark? What is a pattern that bears repeating?
I can only think of patterns I’ve intended to break.
I am neither stirred nor cerebral. Perhaps I’ve cleared the haze. Now, Christmas lights glow against the grey sky. The red leaves have all burned, shaken out like a bedspread from their branches.
