Light Beyond Violet
Most animals that can see color can see UV. It’s the norm and we are the weirdos.
– Ed Yong
The spectrum that’s familiar
ends where violet ends.
Ultraviolet shades a whole other world
to those who see it. For example,
hummingbirds. Reptiles. A few
humans. Insects. Not me.
What’s worth imagining if never
seen? How does that
change us, or restrain us? And what
gain, insight’s unsettlement?
How much (I know) I do
not see blurs borders I will never
fathom. Further. More.
Such light beyond violet. Such sweep
of points past visible points,
I have to wonder what it’s
good for: answering questions,
now that I’ve learned how in
-sufficient my senses are
they turn a spectrum into one
plain color. Still, I want
to heed you, ultraviolet,“near” or “far”
or “middle” as physicists name you,
frames to bind what’s hardly
anchored. All my myths
are shrinking. All the obvious
violet hides more light
which slips, drips, pulses, scatters,
shows stars where I see none,
ignites a stamen for a bee,
the world and all its bodies
not my own.
Abscission with Unfashionable Rhyme
a body wholly body, fluttering / its empty sleeves
– Wallace Stevens
Yes, yes, I know about the chemical change
and about the slowing down of one hormone
for another hormone’s rise, and about the weakening
and folding in of millions of cell walls
so rips and tears along each spine
accrue, degrade with vibrant alterations
(such as hue) the uniformity of the skin
since the body wholly body has grown selfish,
which means its furthest reaching must be cut
from nourishment of any kind, including light,
and that this selfishness throws off a vision
of one kind for a stark, unfruitful, other
but when I lay on the ground not far from one
with nothing else to do (Sunday) but watch
one long slow sweep of unseasonably warm
wind on the oval waverings lift
and loosen and then carry in tilts and drifts
them all in the same direction which in sun
translates to gold-flecked scales ascending
away from where I am—well, even
though I know the world will be left empty
of its eradicable beauties
having been here now, just then, I could die happy.
Some Lichens in an Old Forest
with Gaps
How can something so dry be alive?
These pale frayed greens, for example,
not obvious until I’m close
at hand. Along a tall tree’s trunk or
horizontally on a rock that looks
impervious but isn’t, lichens belie us, not
a splatter or a blotch but a deliberate
occasion of close readings of
the chemistry of reach. They seek
some algal sheath to fruit emergence, then
channel photosynthesis for two
then wait, subdued, until
conditions rapt, their thalluses burst
into view, form ladders of insight & entailment
in a scale of shades, curls, suns, half-moons, aquatic
& acid greens, gray-whites, blues, yellows, brackish
astrals beside the moss & moldering
orange-gold leaves whose microbe-eaten
widening holes admit another
crafty kind of reach. Each skin unfurled
is patience recomposing
itself to become a face. Each
is admitted after probing inquiries
of moisture, dialogic touch. The answers
ripple, arc on every kind
of surface—even metal. Pairs & pairs
of difference! Some live
a hundred years. All require
the holy mist
of light.
Lisa Williams is the author of three books of poems. She teaches creative writing at Centre College and, since 2014, has served as series editor for the University Press of Kentucky New Poetry and Prose Series. Lisa has been the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and the May Swenson Poetry Award. She lives in Danville, Kentucky with her husband and daughter.
Header photo by Bryan Hanson, courtesy Pixabay.
