Brush the pale protrusion
angular and twinned—witness her reach
with a skyward neck to pinch switch
with her whole hand, crab claw
snapping gull beak
or sky; the kind of limb that has a life of its own.
Study her yearning, study her noticing
the light up
the stairwell
whose emanation bends amber
over her right cheek
until she sees she has changed
the living air—
each coil of carpet and railing it transmutes
even her plump arm, even her river eye narrowing
from dilated obsidian
from shifting light—flick me
from the world I rushed to change
to play
on a hallowed in between: the stairwell
below it steps collapsed into cold
slabs of tile, cut and placed before you were
here, their body lifted
from Earth, your skin-wrapped sole:
salt + oil + metal
laced and emancipated in the deep
forest— like a stag but a mother give
your antler finger to her tiny curling hand
together set feet to stone, feel its chill ascend
your blood as ocean reaching
foam over toes, each pearl bone a full moon
knuckled, dimming toward blue black
in the burning cold
and braiding our seaward knees
a cooing mist—
I have arrived
nowhere having known where
I was going but always in
behalf of Light