The Question
What is the light?
Friend closer than my heart I need to ask a question, one from way back, before music: What is the light? Story after story says nothing on this point, each plot caught in its own net. Which of us has ever really looked? Out my window I see leaves bobbing and the sky—behind that the light becomes a mask and we start the long forgetting. It’s like when you see a face or put a hand to your mouth and are surprised at the way the cheese you’ve been cutting smells not expecting the body could remember like that. Philosophers turn the question on themselves. Poets turn themselves into the question. By asking, we wait; in the after is a silence —how sweet that ounce of silence! Only then does it touch us, on the front, across the throat, down the chest, turns to something we wear as we moil into next.