After a Lecture with My Love
Light, when it goes, goes everywhere at once.
The photon that hurtles toward the earth at 186,282 miles a second
flashes just as fast away.
But let a leaf, say, intrude, or a moon, or a man,
and what was everywhere and always is always only one,
and done.
To speak a thing one can’t conceive.
To live in the instant before the instant is.
To feel infinities going dark for this one light along your thigh.
Little Flames
We blinked out.
One by one,
grief by grief,
we who had kept you
you
blinked out.
You grew
into the spaces
between us
until you were as everywhere
as a gas leak.
One real prayer
would set the sky on fire.
Christian Wiman’s most recent book is Joy: 100 Poems (editor). He teaches at Yale University.
Read Christian Wiman’s poem “Club,” appearing in Terrain.org’s Letter to America series.
Header photo of candle by James_Jester, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Christian Wiman courtesy the Poetry Foundation.
