Beneath the Surface: Light

beneath_the_surface beneath_the_surface

By VPB

The light broke on us as we dozed,
six old guys, muzzy with scotch and sun
after dinner and a day’s fishing,
drifting toward dreams in tents along the river.

I was looking up from my sleeping pad,
my tent, my wife’s conceit, open to the sky:
she feared, she said, the ax murderer
well known to every moviegoer.
At least she’d see it coming.


I didn’t see it coming. It was dark
the way the high desert it isn’t really dark.
All was as it is or seems.
Then it wasn’t — an actinic light
brought the world to X-ray difference, nothing
but light and shadow.

Like a delivery van from space, a rock
the size of a delivery van from space was burning
up in the atmosphere, trailing fire.
Or maybe something bigger, smaller.
It unsettled sense.

Only when it was gone did the confirming
impression so insisted on by Bishop Berkeley,
the Idealist’s foundation of empiricism, register:
a shock, a punch, a sonic boom
like an F-16 high up. But this didn’t seem high up.
It was right there. It was right there.


There were other portents, too.
They were portents, of course,
because if they were not signs of what then came,
they would not be portents:
the raven that flew repeatedly at the window
of our new apartment in Oakland.
The figure like a heron or a vulture,
perched in a tree at our campsite on the Buffalo River,
absorbing all light, while evil men plotted harm.
But until then, there was just light,
to see, to be seen in, to be read,
to be interrogated or not.

I grew to fear black birds, but could not read the light.
As when, betrayed by my own heart, I awoke
from anesthesia to be greeted with the news I lived,
having had the conventional experience,
riding on that same high-desert river
with my dead father, into the light.


To what end is light?
It can make you prey to hummingbirds.
As we set up camp, backpacking to an oasis
in the Sonoran Desert, ocatillo and palms,
a sound like a pig grunting
came from nowhere. Then,
turning my head, a needle
five inches from my eye.

The birds were zooming in, flaring short.
They saw me as a flower, flattering idea,
but not when a sparrow with an ice pick sees you,
bright blue shirt and red hat,
as something to penetrate.
They chased me until I stripped,
screaming, “See!”


There is a glacial cirque where none should be
in the middle of the Nevada desert outside Elko.
Ruby Dome is close to twelve thousand feet.
A mile below, Thomas Canyon Campground faces west.
On the road to other places, we’d sit and watch the light,
the canyon’s rocks and aspens.
The aspens, then the rocks, would soften, change, and flow.

They say that light is matter, light is waves,
depending on how you look at it.
Its antithesis is not darkness, but certainty.
German, the sweet, innocent German of Goethe,
gets it wrong: not Aufklarung, not
the arrival of clarity, but “What?”
That is enlightenment.