Call it a Light

 

            --November 9, 2016

 

The glaziers call it a light,

I call it

a pane.

 

One of six, two by three,

each caulked snugly in its little frame,

indifferent to its neighbors

in the side door to the garage.

 

I found it this morning.

 

When it was broken, and how,

who knows?

 

I must have passed it a thousand times,

perhaps even opened the door to fetch

a rake,

the pruning shears,

a fungicide to spray the brown spots

on the mountain laurel,

and missed that horn-shaped splinter

of darkness.

 

This morning on my way to start the car

I noticed it.

Was it because I’d decided

to stop not thinking about

the world, to stop

conversing with the dead poets—to turn off

the white noise that,

like a blanket of snow,

had muffled the sharp edges

of this new, granite upland?

Now, like the boom of trucks,

the world stood forth, swept naked in the gale,

its protruding rocks

too steep to climb

and islanded by deep piles of dead leaves—

too deep, I fear, to stand in.

 

That broken pane.

What might get in?

Rain. Snow.

Or birds (or bats!)

with their nests

and droppings dripping liquid siftings

all over my nice tools.

 

Making a mess

in the tidiness

of my dark interior.

 

I peered in,

and listened.

 

Nothing.

 

Then I opened the door and something flew out

too fast for me to see.