The Long Cold, and: Theories of Light, and: Outside the University, and: When We Watch Children, and: Two Theories of Ideas

The Long Cold

The world remembers how to drink the sun, how to become earth, how to make flowers, how to spread yellow across them, how to invite insects to dance at the centers, how to guide bees toward perfect, tidy homes where honey gathers its fermenting knowledge, and a bear’s monolithic hand hungers through that sweetness to bring warm pawfuls of sun to a mouth that remembers sleep in the earth, winter in caves, the long, cold dream of fish and streams, of blankness, of a quiet until the world shifts and the sun remembers its path along all these living shapes, remembers to light the earth in yellow, to draw flowers out to see beyond their seeds.

Theories of Light

It’s Tuesday morning and light becomes a temple, its long slabs praying across the carpet warming little islands of books, the cat’s belly, and scattered shoes.

It becomes the light in Maine where water swallows the shore in clean gulps of blue drifting back under noon sun.

Becomes the light that burrows down through trees to my gaping, skyward face—how it takes the green from leaves and climbs all the way down to me, emptying full buckets of grace.

Becomes the light that moves like speech across street signs in Boston, the glow in packets of words on green metal that never stops or yields in spite of the way it reads the world, mouthing aloud the shapes it makes plain.

Becomes the firm hum in a streetlight, quiet as a white egg above a neighborhood threaded with squirrels, roads that barely rumble under a lost car, a stream that drinks down into snow and stones.

Outside the University

—for Vermont

There’s this place where the clouds make little Floridas in the   September sky, and they swirl into the green in the leaves. And the trucks deliver packages with their humid engines when they   back up, their beeps make tiny megaphones, but I fill this open sky with the silence of my own mind. Noises become only noises,

while each sound begins in me. Each leaf becomes itself from deep inside a tree. Each pressure washer gargles its water-nozzle language over concrete, and all around us buildings are born into ground, the hot steadiness   of steel girding the earth and climbing for sky. Spiraling out into a world   populated with tiny Hondas, with stadium eagles perched in high granite, with ants exploring their way into cracks—small black bodies filling   holes, making themselves whole.

There’s this place where my mind tends its own field, where the river that wanders underneath steady trees does nothing but feel its own   cold blue, where grasses feel the wind as a stream of stories blowing in from   the west leaving wildflowers that trail back to an origin in yellow and clover, where spiderwebs are maps to simpler homes in thread and time, where clouds race each other to stillness and drift along their own quiet roads.

When We Watch Children

We remember the visions of our futures, how, when they weren’t feeding us, our parents lived in spaceships of their own making, and when I slept in my tiny bed in a pale yellow room with my sisters, I saw grand undiscovered countries filled with tigers and rare birds and the blurred faces of everyone who’d tell me they loved me. We’d eat together—that being the greatest intimacy I knew—slicing   apples for each other with small knives and preparing sandwiches in my   mind’s kitchen. The bread was like holding a cloud. And then maybe we’d read together—my second intimacy—and   imagine the words alive on a back porch staring out over mountains and sky, the wild animals of the letters leaping back to their origin in sound. This is what my remembering watches, this replay of youth and words that writes the same stories each day in a new sky and waits a while...