The poem finally opened itself:
after readings enough, I saw
how the line broke, why
that word and not another.
The pleasure—self forgotten
in attending, briefly lodged
in someone else’s precision,
language doing its work.
Book to shelf. Poem to page.
The body turns to its ablutions:
water, soap, the day undone.
I glance up at the mirror—
it will not hold image.
Water still running. My hands, still wet, suspended.
The book already distant on its shelf,
the lines loosening, unheld.
He formed him
from the ground—
clay still wet,
clinging.
He bent close.
spent breath passed—
spittle,
the damp of earth
at the mouth.
And the man lived:
warm,
hungry,
leaking already
what he would lose.
This was not corruption.
This was the gift.
Sand—
before sight,
before consent,
light broken among grains,
each scattering its claim.
Heat intervenes:
lightning’s instant law,
the long travail of fire,
a stone descending
without regard.
What shatters
learns another order.
Glass remembers
its former dust.
In the mirror
a tower stands—
not stone,
but color
held by lead,
raised through fracture.
Harps flank it,
strings held still,
as if sound itself
were waiting
to be spared.
Notes lie as sand lies,
each apart,
each complete,
owing nothing
to the whole.
Or else the chord
was always present,
and hearing is the art
of consent.
Reflection is not the self,
but the hour
when the many
are allowed
to hold together.
The year begins again, before we ask,
arriving as the light does—simply so.
We do not grieve what has passed.
Too few the days, the weeks, the months, the years
still allotted to our keeping.
We do not hold them, nor pretend to save;
we meet the hour as it comes, unadorned,
and give it back in care, as best we can.
The light returns in fractions—
a minute portioned back today, another
tomorrow. I keep the count,
though clouds obscure the evidence:
three minutes banked by New Year’s,
another half-minute folded in,
five more by Epiphany.
The cold arrives in earnest now:
lake effect, the wind that finds
every weakness in the house’s skin.
But the light grows. The sun
keeps its promise without display,
deposits made, retained, compounded.
I watch for five fifteen, for when
darkness once took the day entire.
Now it hesitates. Now it waits.
February measures what accumulates:
an hour restored, perhaps more.
Afternoon lengthens itself,
light touching the sun room wall
at angles I had forgotten. Still
the snow, still the grey insistence
of overcast—but something
fundamental has shifted.
The sun climbs higher, stays longer,
asks nothing in return. This is not
spring—spring lies, breaks its word
too often to be trusted. This is
mathematics, planetary tilt,
the faithful working of the world’s
ancient machinery.
I am owed nothing.
I receive these minutes anyway.
March brings the balance: day and night
held even, aequinoctium.
The light has kept its promise
minute by minute, fraction
by fraction, until the ledger clears.
Not triumph—the cold can still
return, and will—but equipoise:
that moment of level standing
before the light tips into majority.
I have done nothing to earn this
except continue, except persist
through diminishment, watching
the slow reversal, the patient return.
The light grows still.
The light keeps growing.
The promise is not finished.
Northcoast Antiquarian 