Light has breath and lampposts have amber haloes.

Ecstasy for the gaze is the way

stoplights have an emerald glare extending

six feet from their light source

with the shimmer of 3D holographic trading cards.

 

They hurt my eyes. Driving at night

is being an astronaut without time

I have sight for the static behind

the air that we are blind to,

What my pinholes let in

sets me swaying.

Light is a savage that bowls me

to the blesséd ground.

 

The mocking rainbows

gleam at their own simplicity,

simply gloating off a water cup.

Moonlight is too bright even--

in the way its silver scythe

cuts into my eyes--

I cannot bear the beauty.

 

The eyes (each one) sees in tsunamis

we draw back far, before we ravage.

 

To see and to be awed, without

having to romanticize what we see:

a rearview mirror, silver necklace, bobby pin

as more than its worth but less

than its reflection.

I found the word shatoyant

for the swirling miracle of a soap bubble.

 

Chiaroscuro is a painting term

for light's treatment on the canvas.

How does light treat us

to let visible the world,

like a flashlight in a cave?

 

I daydream that we’re prisms splitting

on the wall of an afternoon parlor

our best china light into neat color spectrums

and omitting the sun in the window frame.

What cares?

No matter where you look,

there is only

dazzlation,

whispered

in awesome exhalation.