HEAT AND LIGHT

Jed Leber, They Never Talk About Lucy Anymore

                                   

We are mere creatures surrounded by darkness and light

surrounded by heat and cold -- always trying to escape one for the other --

inside our warmed houses when ice breaks from the sky

under domes of florescent bulbs at an evening ball game

fiddling with blinds to block out day.

You always said: Remember heat and light, baby

as if it was a code to life on earth

as if it was a mantra to repeat when you are gone

a yoga position to practice and then convert to principle

a relationship I had to remember.

The sun wakes me – it slips under my eyelids. The touch

pleases me as if a lover has placed his lips to my sleeping ear.

He whispers sweet words that bring chills to my skin.

But again I didn’t dream about us and the bed and night are empty

where they once were filled with the presence of you.

Outside there’s a hole in a cluster of moving clouds

a bright ovoid blue as if an eye from heaven

and the notion comes to me that it might be you

and I hear wake up, wake up, wake up in my head

as if a command, a cliché, and something past anything ever said.

Guess I’m only a girl with the sun and stars in her eyes

trying to turn the fire in me down to gentle flame

the stone to building and tears to sea.

I don’t know the way into the riddle of a dead you. I don’t yet know

the whys and whens of your resolution on heat and light.

But I know my way around the sky. And I know my way around my head.

And I know you can’t see the world unless you go inside.

We live inside each other forever -- The spirit stronger than the body’s illusion.

We’re playing with pure energy, baby

still mere creatures adjusting our vigor in the middle of four extremes.

Anita Stienstra