Light

Color my teacher once said is the light we can’t admit.
Green is the one thing leaves are not. This six o’clock sun
that tips through the window of the 116 to Wonderland
can angle blunt despair through a prism into wistful.
By Revere, a few jilted photons start feeling godly,
but God is not a quality of light—its amber, its shine.
Years ago, with the light dying on the roof like this,
a woman I loved without thinking about it
told me how she could only learn to read
by laying a red transparency over the letters,
and put her head in my neck, and let me be warm for her.
In the morning, I wanted the weight of her endless…
If any heat was awe, hers was. Light absorbed
and given back like the wood warmth of the boardwalk
I walked as a child, barefoot for weeks at a time,
sandals left out to whiten with salt air. She married a flutist.
I read into things—the fuzzy halo around those weeks,
and the cataracting over them, all of it blueing, cooling
into casual, what we call ordinary, incidental, past.