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Beating Heart, Dancing Feet

The Evening Light Against the Pines


1

Made both special and acute, flagged by the rotation
of the earth on its axis, the evening light falls

in late spring with a strong and unmasked clarity
which seems to break against the pines

and reveal them in a strictly vertical candor
showing their trunks and crown ratios

and the reach of their branches in an intimate way
much the same as the reach of a woman

pouring coffee in a restaurant or the breast
of a man pausing on a gym floor—sweating

and unaware of the opportunity being seized
to inspect his well-lit presence.  Each year I find

I meet these days with more excitement.  I revel,
decidedly not in my accumulation of memory

but in my appreciation of the beauty of spring
and the coming of summer.  I have grown to love

blue sky and to stand bare-chested in the yard
in June, seeing the flowers arrive—my children

dispelled upon the swings as I acknowledge
my practice to see this acute and special light.

It arrives and aggressively takes the pines
each evening the sky is warm and the wind is blue.


2

These are inchoate descriptions that reference
a memory while driving home the country road

through an intense, natural beauty that appears
suddenly, a certain time of year, a certain

time of day when the air mass is correct
and I have chosen any of two dozen reasons

to leave work inadvertently and then catch
this mannerism of spring and its light at this hour:

unsettling manifestation.  The actual is suddenly now
so real that we inspect it for clues; we get attentive;

we notice our occlusion and it absorbs us, sucking
us up in different ways.  I look at the trees

and see the same enigma that dispels your doubts
and fears.  You see the same light.  You see

similar trees and the spirit hides and shows itself
alternately.  The light recedes.  The flowers arrive

as simple gifts.  Each opportunity presents itself as some
thing to be seized.  We spend our intimate excitement

and go on from there, shimmering as we leave it,
barely able to stay our trembling, illumined shapes.


      for Sherod Santos



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Collected Poetry

Beating Heart, Dancing Feet

The Evening Light Against the Pines
