The Light Only For I love the light too, perhaps the light only. — Czesław Miłosz No, you weren’t imagining, the red moon reflected light filtered through ashes of forests, homes incinerated from within. Floating embers. Dry hydrants. The task? How to explain resurrection to a man drowning in flames? How to explain the sprinklers that turn on to drive him away, searchlights not searching for survivors but intruders, the cigarette that’s verboten, the rape that’s not? Still, I love the light too. It turns a dead sphere the color of fruit, turns eyes away from the sun. Maybe you’re right, morality is the end of humility. But maybe also it’s the most necessary color in the prism, as distorted as it always is. Vibrant. Pulsing. Not long ago, when homelessness was a sin, a homeless man told me, “Immortality, even among the gods, is a cur…
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