Visible Light

You have bought the wrong light bulbs again—
too bright this time. This time you brought
the receipt but first you travel the well-lit aisle
of lighting fixtures. There’s a notice about a ban
on fluorescence which reminds you
of Ben’s offer for a bioluminescence
paddle in the Salish Sea. You want that—
to glide out into a wash of light, stars and sea
bedazzled. But here in the West Seattle True Value,
you are confused by wattage, the question
of dimming and LED. How many hours
of light should you expect? The time changed
this week and you hustle home to walk the dog
before nightfall, his vision dimming with age.
In the dark, he runs into lamp posts even as
they cast a glow and as the neighbors’ televisions pulse
a spectrum of the evening news, the wars brightening
their big screens. You can see into their living
rooms—in a way you never do
during the long summer evenings when you wave
to one another, stop to chat about the weather.
Walking the dog in the gloaming, you feel
an unexpected tenderness for your neighbors,
a desire to enter their darkened rooms and sit
beside them watching the televised world.
Maybe you would be silent together.
Or perhaps, someone would turn on a light,
offer a glass of wine. You want that—
to be a reason for light.

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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Plume, Rattle, and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU.