Only Light Stays Young

   i.

Only a few pages left

in the novel

and then a few blank pages after that

the back cover and then the same

air you’re breathing now only you’ll

notice it

only light stays young we follow

so solid, so slowly and silent, full of thought

as if we were the dust

from the pages and dust

from pages

still made meaning.

   ii.

Remember last summer, the shimmer

of heat on the road?

That was light speeding

best it could, and following

with your eyes—well,

it was like being

a fish seeing water, and stopping

your car didn’t stop it, even

in the shade, and then

neither did closing your eyes.

   iii.

Lose something every day if you want to keep up

with time, or the times, there’s no thought

worth the words

until there are no more words; light

knows before it goes

where it goes just as

only a few pages left means

you’re already breathing again

not symbol and thought

but the dusty air of pure evocation.

**

Stuart Greenhouse is the author of two chapbooks, What Remains (the Poetry Society of America) and All Architecture (End & Shelf Press). His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Chelsea, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/greenhouses_poems.php

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