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.

Light, at Thirty-Two
by Michael Blumenthal

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.