It is the first thing

I think I'm going to undertake a new project.

I'd going to read one poem a day; an old favorite, a new poem, one from a favorite author that I haven't read yet--whatever and I'm going to try to write a poem imitating the one I read. Mara once said that the best way to get to know a poet is to try to write like the. Jimmy said that the best way to learn to write is find writers you love and get to know them. This seems like an interesting endeavor. I'm going to try it for one month first. So, Jan 31st-March 2nd. The game is that the poem needs to be psoted by 10:30 PM CST, in whatever draft it's in at that point. If you're interested, you can find me at http://apoetryexperiment.blogspot.com/

The poem for today? An old favorite that felt like a good, challenging way to start.

"Light, at Thirty-Two"

Michael Bluminthal

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.