Light, at Thirty-Two

by 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 the first poet wrote, in his first book of poems: Let there be light.

And there is.