Too Much Light

Noon sunlight badly frightened him today – sucker-punched
him into thinking there was something he was doomed to do
and had to do it, right now, even as he wobbled from the blow,
and could not utter “NO” – and sank into a heap onto
the couch, and crouched and covered up to get his wits

back: fumbling into lack: humiliated loser: couldn’t stand up
to the bruiser in this fight – eyes shut against how bright it was –
palms over lids: a tense defense against the barest possibility
of sight, of too much light, of too much light, until the fright
began to evanesce, to lift, to pass, and he began to grasp

the flesh-embodied thought that something else was coming in –
something that would last – a softer sense, a pillowed density,
a surer feel, the prospect of imagining that he could tolerate
the “real,” though hadn’t known that he was napping when
it came, all softly lapping at his brain, assiduously curing it

of lameness, disability and slowly constituting a consistency,
a fluvially flowing sameness he could trust, a river of a “now,”
in which whatever dust had screened his vision washed away
to let in new precision of perception, sharper, darker, something
that would tell him how to face – no, not the light, no, not

the light, but something mightier, the thing this soft incursion
had ignited in what he was tempted to describe as “soul” –
no, not a sense of wholeness, but a gaping hole to which
his coalescing psyche, now, he saw, had been invited –
towards which it crept – in which, in fact, it very nearly slept.



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