Keeping Light

Straying toward light at late day's end,

Room warm, suffused,

The intensity of lowering illumination on the book's page

Making the words impossible to see

And the images, looking up, 

Impossible to apprehend in their blinding fade

Mostly

The man sleeps, exhausted,

On the small chaise,

Working unmitigated hours and

Not really knowing what the next chapters might be.

His snoring tells me

He is away, 

Returned to whatever unclaimed 

Pinnacles and unsettled battles in the 

Woodlands and swampy marshes

His wild mind discovers in this, his other 

World, his far, chaotic realm,

And I gaze on the vulnerable him,

Trying to remember love and passion,

And finding just some deep repose 

Of knowing:

Pity and regard in the twisted crosshairs of long enduring,

Shredded with hope and leavened by

The magic light.