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Dimmer

Even when it’s off
it’s really on.
The four LED bulbs
in the fixture suspended
above my kitchen table
emit a ghostly luminescence
as if something haunted but elegiac
were trying to come through.

Jerry, my seventy-eight-year-old neighbor,
can’t remember my name now
unless I remind him,
and he risks getting lost when
he drives to the supermarket
even though he’s lived
in this same town
for nearly thirty years

and freelanced as a travel writer
before he finally retired.
”The words just weren’t there any longer,”
he tells me, and I don’t know
what to say to that
though it seems like
I should offer him
something comforting or profound.

And sometimes,
when I wake at night
and need a glass of water,
I find that glow disconcerting
although it helps me
find my way
through my home
in the dark.

—
Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature. He lives in mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.

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