August 30, 2005
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- August 30, 2005
Because the spirit, too, knows loneliness disasters happen in the universe and someone like myself, smallest of men, finds grace, a nimbus on the wall at noon.
After the hurricane, I drove back home from hiding out safely inside a church. I saw downed oaks squashed across roof on roof or telephone wires; coming down my street
I saw abandoned dogs joined in a pack scrounging the garbage cans, I saw my house. Nothing looked different but some scattered leaves across the front walk: purple, blue and gold.
I knew I never had seen leaves before. I picked up one the color of the sky. I held it while I opened the front door. But I was blinded. I had second sight.
Inside, no lights, no water but just sun. Everything just as God imagined it for me to understand my human need of the material: nothing, everything
was essential where I was staring now. Only one thing was clear: someone was in the room, someone larger than rooms and hurricanes, someone who shone brighter than any sun. [End Page 1271]
There was no word for this except the ones familiar to us all: deliverance. What I was standing in I would call light but it was brighter.
Peter Cooley is author of a number of volumes of poems, the most recent being Sacred Conversations and A Place Made of Starlight. He is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University.
