Cameron McLeod Martin

Qualities of Light

A day is an experiment in living.

Often experiments fail. Sunup, shadows

lengthening, shadows shortening, sleep.

Monotony, bleakness. Bad method-

ology, bunk analysis, confirmation bias.

Deadlines, disappointments, labor.

Not only bleakness, not only monotony.

Eating, drinking, even pissing, even

shitting, even pushing the vacuum

back and forth slowly across the ugly carpet

can be beautiful. Neither ode nor elegy,

essentially. It is worth further investigation, 

asking other questions. It is good to

not become deluded, too jaded, entirely

disabused. Good to phone a friend. Try

again. It’s all about the angle of approach.

Not “all about,” not all about

anything at all, but it matters, I swear

it matters how you hold a thing, how

you turn it in the mind, which facet you bring

to the light. Which you bring the light to.

Qualities of Light

I bought a headlamp so I 

could read in bed at night, 

but it was too bright. 

My eyes would ache and water, 

looking at the page. I use it sometimes 

to walk the dogs I sometimes 

watch for a little extra money

at night, down streets 

not lamplit well enough, waiting 

for the dogs to 

shit into my spotlight, trained 

on some stranger’s yard,

so I can see well enough 

to scoop it into one hand,

leash in the other, and walk it back

to someone else’s home.

It came in a pack of two. I gave

the other to the brother of a friend

I’m not friends with anymore.

New year, different couch, same lonely.

It isn’t killing me

but I could go without. 

I bought a lamp

on Facebook Marketplace 

for fifteen dollars for 

my bedside. It turns on

and brightens to the touch

but can’t get bright enough. 

I put the wrong bulb 

in the socket, an LED,

almost everlasting, its use 

of electricity almost negligible, capable

of subsisting on so little. At its brightest, 

when you’ve touched the lamp 

three times, like you’ve

clicked your heels three times, 

hoping to wake up again in 

homely black and white,

which everyone seems to forget is 

less like life than all that color, 

the bulb loses its goddamned mind, 

flashing like it’s having a seizure or like 

it means to induce a seizure in someone.

It hardly matters, the quality of light,

though I like to tell myself it’s crucial, 

that all would be well if it were

just right, oozing yolk-like through

windows over rooms and days,

books and furniture, golden and tender.

I end most days wrung-out by yearning

I’m too terrified to satisfy or look at

directly, tucked in a blanket in a box

in an economy in an ideology in

a moment in time that terrifies me

when I look at it directly. Even 

for a second, or a moment, 

a medieval unit of time 

determined by light, shadow, 

movement. Roughly ninety seconds,

though that is only an average, though

this is insufficient, all minutiae

and distraction, minor things

which share a common root 

with minutes, the first small part,

sixty seconds, not even 

a mere moment, in which time

everything could change—I want

a better world, better light, a better life—

though things tend to stay the same

or similar enough, absent intervention,

and almost never change 

on time, as expected, with fanfare

despite the theater of the new year,

its spent fireworks lying

soggy on the water meter grate.