Lighter,
the word that comes to mind after many nights.
As when a plane descends over a city
you call home, the body’s rise against the belt
strung across your lap. Darkness and lampposts,
like gold and silver beads below, falling
into them. Or better yet, wading in
the bioluminescent bay and each kick
creates a soft glow, each stroke makes you think
light could come from the body, and not
a world disturbed into brilliance. Because
it captures what I mean—both the weight
and how you see what you could not. As when
I heard him cry and lumbered down the hall
to find you there first, pacing the room, singing
softly in his ear. Through the window,
the city sparkled and seemed to have grown
though, by day, I never see more than
two or three men working at once, lifting
together, say, a plank of wood. Years ago,
my mother sat beside my bed, eager to bear
the fever with me. We pass him back
and forth between us until it breaks,
and I no longer want what I wanted
before. As when one day you look upon
the house you’ve built and can’t recall the field.
from A Question of Gravity and Light. University of Arizona Press. 2007. Used with permission of the author.
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Blas Falconer is the author of A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press 2007) and The Foundling Wheel (forthcoming Four Way Books Fall 2012). He is the coeditor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press 2010) and the poetry editor of Zone 3: A Literary Journal/ Zone 3 Press. A recent recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, he coordinates Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.
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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.
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