The Good Light
Our love cupped like water in palms,
we search for the day’s first words.
Paree looys, I whisper to my son,
and then good light, the cart that
follows the mare over hillside rake.
In this early country of understanding,
he thinks of what it means to be
right first, and the next sound after
is luminous and cloud, spark and soft
embrace, weightless, a butterfly once.
Its fragrance is a station of ignition,
and then we’re off into the first laps
meaning will run in a life of language
and longing. And in this marking
that is every waking, there is also
making and its child wonder, who
lets the translation sit on the tongue
for a while before swallowing it whole
and searching for new morning thirsts.
Alan Semerdjian’s poems and essays have appeared in various publications and anthologies over the past twenty-five years, including Adbusters, Diagram, and Brooklyn Rail. He released a chapbook of poems called An Improvised Device (Lock n Load Press) in 2005, and his first full-length book In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books) in 2009. His music has been featured in television and film, and charted on CMJ. He has performed over one thousand shows across North America.
