Light Year by Regina DiPerna
“Rat. Pearl. Onion. Honey. These colors came before the sun lifted above the ocean, bringing light alike to mortals and immortals.” – Homer, The Iliad
Under rat-colored sky,
a window swings open
its sash, floods the other
side of the world
with cold light,
the not yet of dawn;
nets full of stars recede,
become bare slats
of blue between cedars,
fewer magpies than before,
fewer feathers loose
in grey air.
*
There is a place called
human, cave, fire,
and a place called church,
a place called sorry,
I didn’t mean to. There is
a place called Shaw Road,
called left at the light,
called Red Hook or Shanghai
or elsewhere. There is
a place called afterlife
and no one has been there
but everyone seems
to know what it looks like,
how to carve its thin lace,
its infinite balconies from
the raw pearl of days.
*
The houses are haunted
by nothing but moth-eaten
blouses, the shock of silence
spreading like a vine.
The onions are yellow
and white and cold beneath
the soil, some are decaying
right now, spinning their
pale skin into rot.
We won’t outlive the sun;
this is true whether you
believe it or not. The light
still meets glass, slate,
earth at all the familiar angles.
Onion skin falls away
from the bulb like dry leaves,
a fainting woman, sheaves
of straw-paper released
from her hand.
*
There is a place called warm
spreading on the horizon,
a place called home light years
in the other direction.
Under honey-colored sky,
you aren’t what you were
but you’re here, raking
your starry fingers through
the dirt. Everything falls
slower in light like this;
heavy gold globes trickle
through the atmosphere,
which falls and rises and whispers
and hushes and whispers again.
*
