By Lee H. McCormack
To have nothing, or desire it to be, or to be in a place
where nothing is, is the game of blind old monks.
How some friends and family come
to a similar understanding is deceptive —
they astonish us with the ability
to overcome motion, disappear completely,
and even our sadness doesn’t stop transparencies
of skin from lighting up their hands and faces
like Chinese paper lanterns. Brighter
to children than they are to us
the shape of lanterns doesn’t change,
nor the quality of light and skin,
but after awhile the faces dim, and the hands
are really our hands, not theirs.
Light from a human body at its end is a liquid
that can’t be spilled or wiped off.
These things we do to each other, that help us
become each other, resurrects the light
of motions made as family, friends and lovers.
What’s amazing is the way we keep on glowing
afterwards, like the juice of lightning bugs
we used to rub across our skin, crushing them
against the back of our hands until
we glowed, roughly, Buddha-like, old, dim,
attaining nothing except the light
fading quietly in the dark.
A resident of the dank and moldy primal forests of West Tisbury for over 30 years, Lee H. McCormack has been occasionally reported as actually being seen alive, usually from a great distance through high-octane vision-magnifying devices.