Alan Shapiro

Light the pursuer, dark the pursued.

Light wants to fill dark with itself

and have it still be dark

so light can still be filling it.

Light pours from the massive shining of the chandelier

over the bronze boy bending beneath it

to the bronze pool where a watery face

is rising to meet his as he bends.

Light the pursuer, dark the pursued,

along the naked back and arms,

the hands, the fingers reaching

for the rippling features, just

beyond, just out of the grasp of

into and out of, and across

the marble floor and pillars,

to the tips of leaves, and up

the lion claws of chair legs and sofas and

over the glass tops of tables in the lounge,

light losing dark by catching it,

dark giving light the slip by being caught,

on elevator doors, down every

blazing hallway to the highest floor,

the farthest room, and through it

beyond the pulsing colors of the muted screen,

from hip to hip in a loose twilight

of sheets no longer shifting.

Over the lot a sodium aura

within which

above the new cars sprays

of denser many-colored brightnesses

are rising and falling in a time lapse

of a luminous and ghostly

garden forever flourishing

up out of its own decay.

The cars, meanwhile, modest as angels

or like angelic

hoplites, are arrayed

in rows, obedient to orders

they bear no trace of,

their bodies taintless, at attention,

serving the sheen they bear,

the glittering they are,

the sourceless dazzle

that the showcase window

that the showroom floor

weeps for

when it isn’t there –

like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.

Here is the intense

amnesia of the just now

at last no longer longing

in a flowering of lights

beyond which

one by one, haphazardly

the dented, the rusted-through,

metallic Eves and Adams

hurry past, as if ashamed,

their dull beams averted,

low in the historical dark they disappear into.

The present tense

is the body’s past tense

here; hence

the ghost sludge of hands

on the now gray strip

of towel hanging limp

from the jammed dispenser;

hence the mirror

squinting through grime

at grime, and the worn-

to-a-sliver of soiled soap

on the soiled sink.

The streaked bowl,

the sticky toilet seat, air

claustral with stink—

all residues and traces

of the ancestral

spirit of body free

of spirit—hence,

behind the station,

at the back end of the store,

hidden away

and dimly lit

this cramped and

solitary carnival

inversion—Paul

becoming Saul

becoming scents

anonymous

and animal; hence,

over the insides

of the lockless stall

the cave-like

scribblings and glyphs

declaring unto all

who come to it

in time: “heaven

is here at hand

and dark, and hell

is odorless; hell

is bright and clean.”

A space to rise in,

made from what falls,

from the very mass

it’s cleared from,

cut, carved, chiseled,

fluted or curved

into a space

there is no end to

at night when

the stained glass

behind the altar

could be stone too,

obsidian, or basalt,

for all the light there is.

At night, high

over the tiny

galaxy of cancles

guttering down

into dark chapels

all along the nave,

there’s greater

gravity inside the

the grace that’s risen

highest into rib

vaults and flying

buttresses, where

each stone is another

stone’s resistance to

the heaven far

beneath it, that

with all its might

it yearns for, down

in the very soul

of earth where it’s said

that stone is forever

falling into light

that burns as it rises,

cooling, into stone.