Tag: light

I was thinking about touching the light
that touched the sidewalk
that touched the squinting faces
of Abrahamic patriarchs, light
that now fell upon half-lidded
undergraduates in a caffeinated daze
on a mazy day in the simplest place
in the world, an altar in a valley
in a library.

I was thinking about how far away
I was from the headlines yet
the hearsay was here, only I wasn’t there —
not with the “dozens of snakes dumped in
an Arkansas Walmart parking lot,”
not where they decreed that
“saturated fat was not the devil,”
not when “the world’s last male
northern white rhino joined Tinder
to find a mate.”

I was thinking about how in leaving
this sanctum of damaged denim and
unwoven eye contact I would be forced
up into the light, into the beam that
encapsulated the paradisiacal serpent
and Esau in his gluttonous rage
and The Rhinoceros of Versailles
as he paced his marble menagerie.

I was thinking,
but the light made
hazy prophets
of the newsworthy,
and here I was walking
in low LED, looking down
upon the ticker line.