There is a term from the Renaissance.
Italian in origin. Some believe Caravaggio coined it
(others, Baglione).
Chiaroscuro.
The interplay between light and dark
in a painting. The presence of darkness
makes the light vibrate all the more.

~

The parents wait in a flock.
The school bus bleats its lights.
Normally, this incites modern impatience.
The indignity of stasis.
Of waiting.
Today I watch the kids emerging,
immaculate as uncut marble.
The parents wave intensely, almost comically.
The kids are befuddled.
One by one they are folded into their parent’s arms.
They squirm, then they relent,
falling into that familiar body.

~

There was a night in late August.
She waited for me on her porch,
reading.
It was the end of our second summer together.
Our bodies were familiar by then, well-mapped.
The new discoveries that function as desire’s provender
were mostly over.
(I think, now, we were like archaeologists
nearing the end of a dig.
Or, to be consistent, cartographers, weary,
blind from having looked too long)
She saw me approach and she vaulted towards me
with the lissome grace of a girl
in the midst of first love. The force
of her body
leaping into mine
stunned me.
I like to think that if I were to experience
a lifetime of such greetings,
day upon day upon day,
I would not grow tired of them,
would not grow bored,
would not consider such enthusiasm overwrought.
But my species is capable of massacring children.
And we waste our lives chasing money, and
bloat ourselves on entertainment
while thousands starve. We fetishize violence
so that we cannot look away
while eight year olds try to describe watching their classmates die.
We take love for granted.
And I am a little ashamed
that while parents in Connecticut
identify the ruined bodies of sons and daughters
that I want to end this poem with a song,
but I want to end this poem with a song.
It is the end of summer. The cicadas throb in the trees.
The wind is like a hymn.
She glances up, and glides towards me,
body pearly as one of Baglione’s saints,
emerging from the baroque dark




* with credit to Robert Hass from his poem "Interrupted Meditation"