The Poem I Was Talking About in Class

Light, At Thirty-Two 
Michael Blumenthal 

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it 
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered 
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned 
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin 
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal 
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that 
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn 
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke—God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.