Mining the Light
By Keith Shein
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Mining the Light - Keith Shein
—Thoreau
BITS of LIGHT
We say this with hands because there’s no other way.
We say, I reach inside and come up empty.
We’re never empty but we can feel that way. The brown
trumpet vine puts out one last purple flower, and we
shake our heads. A breeze shuts our eyes.
Dying camellia blooms litter the sidewalk, and these
can break a heart. We say the heart, but it’s not.
It’s in our chests, near our hearts, but we don’t know what it is.
The blooms look like the tossed corsages from a prom
or flowers from a funeral at sea, though we know nothing’s lost
because nothing’s kept, even if remembered.
There’s a man running his hands over a pond. He seems
to be saying, It’s all right, it’s going to be all right,
and people look but not too long.
I’d like to walk that bridge. I could paint and repaint
the girders and cables so they never rust. I’d live in a shack
down by the water and daily clean my brushes. Because we have
no other way to think about it. Looking out of eyes, there’s a gap.
The flight of a hawk lifts us and makes us wonder.
We’re not the bird but the bird’s in our hearts. We are the bird:
our seeing creates it, in a space that has no wind, no air, where
the bird is not soaring. We can be lonely and lost inside ourselves,
singing to others, the world, not knowing who’s calling, who hears.
I’m on a river. Often in my mind I’m on a river. The dark water
swirls around my legs and presses tight. My feet feel
for a hold, then move on, touching, floating for another hold.
Railroad trestles stand fallen in the stream, and spent mayflies
cloud above the water. They shine as if they’ve swallowed
bits of light, and the weight floats them down. When the fish strikes,
my heart races, but that’s not what brings me to the water.
There’s a hollow moment when the fish darts, pulling to get free.
When I release the fish, it feels like I’m holding my own emptiness.
When it fins away, I’m not any fuller or free, but I breathe, then, the river.
KINGFISHER
A truck rattles by, rumbling.
Bird song follows, and it feels like it might rain.
Then a kingfisher, solitary as always, lights
on a snag in the river, just the two of us
with the water between. The bird seems a sign,
but so did the path that tangled in scrub.
I could hear sound of the river through the branches—
its smell like sour tea. Going back
up, then, to go round, only to stumble down
the nettled bank, and the path right there
in the trees. Or the breath of wind caught in leaves,
or a stone, the one colored one side
like a mask and the other like a heart, cold,
warming to the touch, but mute
as things can be. Clouds, wind, the casts draw lines
in the water, reach, disappear, swing
and come up empty, the top the same as the bottom.
When I look up from untangling a knot, the kingfisher
has flown. But I know things I could not know,
and cast and cast again.
The line comes: if what we eat becomes us,
what we crave are ghosts. The line comes tight.
The fish gasps on the beach, but that’s not what
turns me wild. It was the bird—believing