Poetry |

“The Speed of Light” and “William and the Fox”

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.

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