I love how the bright winter light lays over the landscape. Like precision-cut puzzle pieces, extracted from the blonde wood of another world. In strong angles across building facades. Through windows, shimmering. Over interior walls, awash over floors of poured concrete. Scattered light—a heart-rending oblation to Osiris, courtesy of physics. Near noon, the color of the light is a blend of yellow, white and blue, somewhere between the stained glass of shallow water and a low-saturation, darkly devoted goldenrod. Shyly, then with increasing boldness, shadows approach. Anubis, around the corner. Shadows, on the cool, wet-to-the-touch walls of the cave, in concave degrees. A pillar’s shadow, long on the floor. A signpost’s angular twin, like a flag on the skin-colored sidewalk. Shadows cast against the many surfaces of the neighborhood. Shadows on the pockmarked roads, the cracked traffic lights, the thin and sickly patches of grass. None of it is made newly beautiful. But like an organ shifting, sighing, shimmying down the length of my spirit in a trail of blood, I feel that change in the frame of my mind, christened by light and shadow. A new ability to pay attention to different things. On the train platform, I watch the shadows and the light, coupled, moving sideways together—and I imagine moving like that too, through the world in two dimensions, like a figure in a mural of the ancient world, haughty face only in profile, arms and wings extended. Eyes and fingernails of inlaid gemstone.
Oh, to walk through this paradise of light and shadow and to resist, with an almost violent intensity, the urge to pull out a phone. If I were a painter, I’d drag out all my oily colors instead—haunting blue, sedate gray, hopeless white—over to the canvas of the window and start now. Start what? Well, that’s the beauty of it. If I were a musician, I’d dart back inside the apartment and then back out, violin case in hand, to play something limpid and twisted amid all this metamorphosis. Easy does it, now. I watch the light move and the shadows follow as time passes, slowing down to a secret rhythm. I feel it do something to my thoughts. Strip them, and then reclothe them in something new. Toeing the ground outside the supermarket, examining my face in the bedroom mirror, jogging up the stairs of the station, dragging a carry-on through a terminal. I look around and notice the lines of shadow—slicing the ceiling, cutting across the path ahead—and, in that tiny clear pool of time, something sprouts. I’m looking at something, then at nothing at all. My mind ventures off-circuit. Silver bicycle, ribbons tied to the handles, upside down in the luxurious grass, wheels spinning.
Horus in flight, I swing my legs and change direction. Underneath me, a hundred-thousand paths, carved in dirt, in air, in water, crisscrossing. All of them as least as long as longing is long. Look, there’s the path of least resistance. And there, the path of most fruitlessness. Blink away the tears; let your vision clear. Are they same? They fade into one another, in parts, and then they part, definitively. A path hosting a ceremonial procession. A path heavy with bristling undergrowth. A path swarming with pedestrians. A path at deepest and most tender midnight. Shadowless. I squint, blurry-eyed, into the horizon. I lean forward. I don’t know what I’m looking at. Stars start in surprise. Eyes of the sylphs, past and future. Light and shadow. Spiral and line. False and true. Friction and intention. Cave and crater. Flush and fade. No, not quite there yet. Truth and truth. Light and shadow.