For a Sky Ravished by Light

I remember sitting at my childhood table

eating my daily cereal, when the sky

opened up, its astonished edges

marked by the absent beams where our ceiling

once was.  The kitchen’s frame

wobbled, its light-

weight walls no longer held fast by the roof, and the sunlight

spilled onto the table.

I looked up past the exposed frame

to what seemed my own square of sky

kneeling down through the lifted ceiling

to feather the edges

of my experience, till then edged

with careful walls, with even the light

kept in order and at bay.  But I knew of stained glass ceilings,

jewels poured down on feasting tables

and soaring buttresses pointing somewhere north of sky.

To frame

a life implies containment; to frame

your words requires care.  Both ways of hedging

your bets.  If you ask the sky

how it feels to be ravished by light

it will say it isn’t able

to place a ceiling

on loving and being loved.  And we have no calling

to hold apart our fragile frames

when we lie together on the table

making a meal of our kisses.  Your hair is edged

with the last light

of the swooning sky

and as the dark diffuses down, the sky

tilts its sighs towards the vanishing ceiling.

How light

these bodies, how fast these frames

tip towards the edge

of time and table.

Let’s table time, the distance between ceiling

and sky, the frame

that marks the edge of light.

Copyright 2015 Carrie Myers, originally published in “Re-Imagining Theologies: Asian / – Americans and Faith.”   March 28-May 15, 2015, at the Walls-Ortiz Gallery and Center