As long as the lights
stay on, we’re stuck.
You can’t sprout wings
or rake me with sudden claws.
I can’t turn into
a storm-tossed tree
or an otter slippery as sin.
In the light, we are
smaller than life.
Our cries are nothing
but failed words
& our sighs & gasps
might just as well
have been emitted by some
tired engine.
Light always wants
to pin us down,
to make nakedness into
a mere absence of clothes,
a sleight-of-hand devoid
of actual magic.
It strands us
in our separate flesh.
Hit the lights
& let’s get out of
this walled garden!
Let our bodies return
to their original habitat.
There’s a rusty gate
at the end of the path,
& the whole dark forest
just beyond.
See Rachel’s photographic response, “At the junction.”
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Dog Logic
- The Colors of Noise
- Crossing Wales
- Memo from the CEO of Little Prince, Inc.
- Poems to be shaved into the hair of the author’s back
- Desideratum
- Capture
- Living in Analog
- Organ Meats: A Primer
- Walking Weather
- Beach Glass
- Tree Without Birds
- Hermit
- The Captain’s Reverses
- Pets
- Exchange
- Heart
- Digital
- The Fullness of Time
- Pandora
- Reading the Icelandic Sagas
- Hit the Lights
- Vagina Dialogue
- Helmsman
- Old Norse Family Values
- On Hold
- Heels
- Looking for the Reader
- The conversation continues: two videopoems
Oh god, I love this, Dave! I know I ought to see the long, long North-European mid-summer days as a blessing. But I often have a hard time with it, long for the daylight to be snuffed out and kept out so that I can me rest, let me sleep later than 4 am… I am so deeply a creature of the dark forest.
‘can me rest’… that’s as well as my mind works in this bright, bright sunshine…
Thanks, Jean. Darkness does get a bad rap, doesn’t it? Like you, I don’t function too well in brightness and heat, and pine for the long, lazy mornings of midwinter.
Lovers hold the light at bay by touching during the day.
Well put! Yes.