Corporeity, bodily extension, is either light or a participation in light: something which acts through the power of light.–Grosseteste

i.

Diagram of the quad on a slow spring afternoon, green shooting into its rightful place:

○ Low hum of the generator.

○ Crow song is gospel filtering through the trees, audience of one.

○ The planes of the theater’s roof lie inert in a painterly light, clear-cut against its shadows, Chiaroscuro edges. Compare that to Light clotting through the gnarled tree, that is chewed up and spit back onto the patchwork ground.

○ It’s the day before your birthday. The silk of sixteen years slips through your fingers.

○ Monet sat under a broader, bluer sky, shoes bracketed by an Oak’s shade, and reified his devotion to gardens of lilies, rather than Paris and her towering metal. An Impression of spontaneity; your eyes unfocus to adjust to the narrative. As his vaunted eyes began to suffer from cataracts, white became yellow, red gave way to orange, and the cool tones of water lent its hand to gold’s zeal. So, you can see the light glinting on leaves and not the spaces between, only the fuzzy edges that suggest overlap. The more you are caught in the clear sky the more disturbingly blue it becomes, a pigment tap-tap-tapped in by a brush. An Impression of distance; the untouchable ceiling of the universe seems a hair’s breadth away. The painting tells you this: grip the rim of a puddle, but only peer into the wide placating mirror that greets you. With one hand pressed past the silken surface, the fiery chill of the water would surely bite it right off you and suck you clean-bloodless-blind. Only the crows know this because they have put themselves in the mouth of that cerulean gaze & felt nothing.

ii.

Feel nothing; see nothing; be nothing. When you’re aware of everything

it can feel like nothing at all. An animal brain is uncooperative like that.

A spray of dark pinpricks in the sky bursts out from a

concentrated center, cresting over the theater. The murder

dissipates in the sky before an eye tells itself to blink. This
is natural movement–this is the kineticism that belies the blood underneath,

the Golden ratio unspools; light in motion.

Friction eating up momentum; the crows vanish

off-canvas, leaving only the light as casual disruption.

iii.

Light, which was Genesis struck in the first cattail reed; lightning combustion in a bottle; champagne-pop clearing away the telephone static; the voice that inquired on its visitor slid out of the water and became incredibly lonely. Sight lends way to desire. The primitive mind spun paint, from flowers; El Dorado, out of mud houses; novelty, from flesh. Physicists, the least romantic, will tell you, we’re never really touching, not unless you’ve punctured them–the distance between atoms like riverbanks. Infinitesimally inconsequentially—

enormous! Anatomically, no heart could bear a weight that heavy. Good thing, the pain of wanting passes through your body swiftly, like nostalgia, or a bullet. We can stay transient visitors: keep busy filling in the gaps of light/dark/sight/touch, before the spark runs its circuit. Leaving behind imprints of ridged fingertips, and mountain ranges wax-pressed against the papery sky. Blood rushing to the surface actuates our propensity toward touch, displacement. Leave the light on at the end of the hallway, or our bodies may cease to exist. Without reception-to-sense, without rays of absorption to dispersion, without a voice at the back door calling us back.

iv.

But–

I’m seventeen and tired of wanting. I couldn’t tell you what I ate last night, or the technicolor chaos of my dreams. The news anchor remarked on the rain; a basement flooded. All that remains is the chalk outline of something on-the-run. I knew nothing about myself before, which is how the sadness didn’t kill me. Now, I can hold it in my fingers, a silver coin, a sugar pill; my mind is mine to own. Clouded crystal ball: show me a life worth living, and I’ll spin a metaphor. Let me gather stalks of light and spin it into gold, let me pay my debt of sixteen years, the crime of closing my eyes to it all.  

Nothing can be held in my hands. Sand sieves through. 

v.  

Nebulous movement by the fence. Laughter in perpetual suspension.

A squirrel is a skittish creature, who deigns to greet me 

with that odd tilt of his head, then is Gone with a shake of the leaves.

There are more noises I can not discern. Scenes that are only a blurry, myopic bruise.

Could-be animals. Could-be nothing.