Tuesday, October 28, 2008

the import of light



I've started including slivers of light in some of my product shots. I love light. I don't like it when the daylight shortens so that darkness falls early or when it's still dark at 7 in the morning. It makes me want to sleep till 10.



When I wake up with the light streaming through my bedroom windows and gleaming off my white walls I like to take a moment to admire how it reflects off a book spine or slides across my skin.


So let me share this. The last stanza is unforgettable, as are the images of the broken bottle and the cotton dress turning to silk.


Anyway, I hope you enjoy this, and perhaps find a way, today, to celebrate the light.



It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke—God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.






2 comments:

  1. I'm right there with you about light. This time of year there are crystalline moments that leave me with a lump in my throat, thunderstruck at the altar of an incandescent rose or a flickering maple.

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  2. Wow! That was awe enspiring. Never quite thought of light like that. It does change the way things look though.

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