Some Varieties of Religious Experience

Once we said light came into us,
penetrant and hallowing, a feeling like standing
on the sixty-fifth floor of a skyscraper
built from solid glass. But now it lingers outside
and favors the edges, limning car fenders
and discarded corn-chip bags, valuing it all
the same. Once we said In sorrow, said Sweat
of thy brow. My father, in his pulpit, said,
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you. 
My god, my god. That was when my brother
and I hoped our parents would again forget
to set the alarm on Sundays, letting us keep
the Sabbath by watching a few more cartoons.
Weeks ago, in the mountains, my wife and I
looked at the new-moon sky through binoculars
and saw, behind the stars visible to our unaided
eyes, the crowds of dimmer lights pushing
through the darkness like forest ground cover
straining for sun. An undergrowth of stars. How
many more millions of years into the past were
we observing, and what happens to all those photons
when the cosmic expansion moves them too fast and far
to be seen? In the city, we’re already living
in that unconstellated future, our nighttime the grayish
blur of an erased blackboard, only Jupiter
beaconing through the glare. Light pollution:
like claiming too much tranquility can cancer
the soul. I have always been a lover of tranquility,
wrote Wang Wei in “The Green Stream,” a poem about
following a river to its source only to lose
himself in delight and longing on the way. He never
mentions the light, though it’s everywhere in his lines,
in the quiet colors of the pines and the mirrored reeds
and rushes. Wang knew we see the world through
its reflection, the forms bearing the brightness to us
like Jupiter that cannot shine by itself. He was
a painter and a good Buddhist. But like his desire
to sit down there and fish, it was hard not to want
that play of surfaces to just go on and on.

Read more from Issue 22.2.