THE QUALITIES OF LIGHT
We were drinking jasmine tea
in the dusk on the cedar deck,
the last gleaming gone to a deeper blue.
Summer blue, the evening star
shooting hard out of the shadows.
Over the pond, the first tiny bats
skimmed the surface for mosquitoes,
drinking from the reflected sky.
The light is always with us.
We know the world by light
and by the loss of light:
the brutality of noon;
the promising grey
before a dawn
creeping with tentative bird song;
the same grey that signifies
a night wildly spent,
the one
where we all …