WHAT IS LIGHT

by John Sibley Williams

 

 

What is rain to us
soaked to bone
who could enter
the warmest house
but who linger unchained
in this open field?

            *

What is faith to us
sequestered in a windowless room-
aglow in neon and lamps without shades
and a gavel driven into a wooden table
in a room without room?

            *

What is sleep to us
who know what it is to wake
curiously?

       Act I

We all arrive by different streets
with different dialects of silence
exploding in our mouths

and the whole city hears
this beautiful holler
rise uncertainly above it
like a storm cloud
awaiting its rainbow.

       Act II

We all arrive by different streets
shielded by our personal mantras.

You say beauty is
this shared anonymous silence.

I say the whole city will die,
silently, with me.

We argue well into night
and somehow are comforted.

       Act III

We all arrive by different streets
fearing the transparency of clothes—

that in our own hideous undress
we wear the whole human race.

       Act I

When I go there
I go by bone
most often,
hardened bone
carried by sediments
of iron
that would rust
if exposed to all this rain.

       Act II

So I keep inside
the heavier elements
and speak in man-made
polymers,
plastics,
and gases
that won’t so easily combust.

       Act III

But those that upon a candle
consider
if this time
they too should burn
or simply become
again
the air—

those are the cherished memories
I wear around you
uncertainly.

 

 

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