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Poetry
The Light-Writer
You write with light on walls of rock—
Your ink-light gutters off from a star
that at any given moment,
reveals day to half a world,
and in half a world, half-meanings are spun:
waking, wisdom, truth, warmth,
the day-modes of being proclaimed
by sheets of light; between
halves of worlds, walls,
divisions go down—day melts
into night, and night into day;
your writing blurs the words of night—
tethered to an earth, a moon wails,
while my tall soul cradles the stars
in my eyes, living letters of torches
that might now be asleep in their graves.
And in fractions of worlds where
your ink is not a bursting flood
or a blurring kiss, You write
secret notes on hidden walls,
weaving through forest curtains and canopies
of tradition or blinded thought,
gracing the palms of the lowest
lichens of ownerless ground,
knocking on hearts of boulders, stubborn
on the fragile faces of our bones, breaking
through our clefts and crevices, your invisible fire
courses the flagrant seas between eye and toe,
more luminous than the miracle of air
that lurks in lungs and gills and underwater caves.
And yet, Light-Writer,
the dark between worlds
is a savanna of scattered suns,
the voids unspeakable distances
between heavens and hells—
is your silence the shadow of your wings?
Is your shadow the blindest, the loneliest dark?
The worms of my dreams
escape nightly into the endless sky
and burrow in your shadow
to find in the deepest darkness
the farthest light