In the early December late afternoon,
the sun catches me by surprise.
I have been buried under greyness recently,
felt frosted onto the ground with the tips of the grass
and the remains of my autumn mums.
Sun comes southerly into windows facing west,
and shines through the grated pane of glass
on the door that leads from the stairwell outside.
I see it on the wall there, first, winter-twinkling,
and I chuckle, remarking on its peculiarity,
its unusual appearance on these darkest of days.
Shadows through the cedars tell me about the old habits of trees,
about a sun that has been shining for so long and for so brief a time—
more than four and a half billion years, or since 7:38 this morning,
when I was awake and making coffee in the near-dark
and looking at those same cedar trees still covered in dusk,
hands on my hips, listening to the hot water drip
through the filter on the counter behind me.
And that filtered light passes through diamond-shaped spaces
in the grate over the window in the door,
and the light I see on the wall then reminds me of the back
of a record in my parents’ collection—a photo of the back
of a woman standing facing a plate-glass window
gridded with huge panes,
she herself a dark and curving silhouette against the sky,
so certain, rising up from the ground, witness to a sunset.
And so, the light is twice-shadowed,
once each naturally and unnaturally obscured,
on the wall that descends into the basement,
where I’m headed with a basket of laundry;
down here, where it smells like cement and wood and cobwebs
and clean dirt, and there is more surprising light on the wall
from a couple of windows high up on the cinder-block wall.
Even here, in the foundation of this house,
the late, low-angled sun finds its way in,
through scrappy December-bare brush
that normally hedges the house with leafy cover.
From there, the sun shows up on the pegboard
in an angled square that will disappear
when the sun sets in only a few more minutes.
Light has a fragile cast in almost-winter.
