It is like the first and last time I tried a Coleman
for reading in bed in Maine. Too early the camp
went dark for fossil habits, no longer could candleflame
convince my eyes, and I lit that scary lamp.
Instant outcry came from the savage white light
of the mantles, as if a star had been brought down
out of space and trapped by the unchinked logs of the bedroom,
roaring its threat to explode the walls and be gone,
or as if the lamp could tell time and knew that one tongue
was no longer enough to speak with, it must double its blare,
overwhelm two senses at once, that the jaded heart
might burst into ravished applause for its son et lumiere.
Perched on a pile of books on the seat of a chair
drawn to the head of the bed, the lamp called out
the guilty years and shamed them for cracks and shrivels
on the furniture’s structure and finish, for their pouring and
drought
that bent the patient, scabbed logs of the walls and ceiling.
Then I opened a book whose every radiant page
was illuminated in colors of lightning and thunder
by the quick-witted lamp in its artistry of rage.
The book and the lamp fused to one voice, whose sense
became mine, strokes of a slow, rhythmic broom
swept a dusty pith that seemed to lie still until
some other sense told me that there were wings in the room.
In one much earlier year I had fallen asleep
in the meadow, head near bright heights of fireweed, fireweed
strewn on my chest from a hand that let go its bouquet,
and had wakened at eyelash touches, the delicate need
of five blue butterflies that found me in bloom.
Now, striking my neck and cheeks, came the first
wave of this late invasion, three flying bugs
that hit me, lit, flew again, hit, an outburst
the lamp had called for through log-gaps and screenholes,
then
more entered the air, winged in gray, brown, dun,
and more, as I tried to read on, in the muted shades
brushed on by sundown’s dimming imagination.
Beetle-bodied or light as moths they came
and, big and small, bombed the lit skin of face,
arms, shoulders, rested, crawled, unfurled, and sent
the blind wanting that stuffed full each one’s carapace
in a clicking crash at the lampglass, then crazily flew
back to me, the bared part of me becoming a plan
for plates of an insect book whose specimens
rearranged themselves fiercely over and over again.
For as long as the lantern lasted they would have kept coming,
as if the great darkness had smiled at that tiny dawn
and had hurled them in fistfuls straight at the speaking light
in answer to what was being insisted upon.
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