This poem is a combination of--
one of the wonderful things about writing poetry
is how all kinds of tiny, little things
converge into one effort at least.
And partly, it was because I got to know
a young, 15-year-old woman who had a really rough life,
and I was thinking about how hard it
was to be her when she'd think things over at night.
Also, I went through the dictionary, which I love to do,
and found the word luminist, which originally
applied to painters who were particularly
interested in light.
And the third thing that perhaps occurred to me before I wrote
this poem was, somewhere in Wallace Stevens' letters,
he's questioning something-- maybe about the Saint Agnes Eve
poem--
where he's saying that if moonlight comes
through stained glass in a church,
it doesn't give color because the type of light it is.
I don't know if this is true.
I haven't tried it out.
It just makes light, but it doesn't reflect the color
like sunlight does.
So this is a poem where I imagine
a young, pre-teenage girl would wish
to be a painter of some kind, but she questions everything.
It's called "The Luminist at Age Eleven."
"She's heard that apples go silver in moonlight,
that the lavender cloud of phlox along the wall
is absorbed by rocks, and that even the steady village
church is eaten away on a night like this.
They told her, when the moon shines through a stained-glass
window, there are no reds or blues
crossing the floor, that the light is a kind of air.
She pictures her foot lifting and vanishing
through wet grass.
First this, then that, depends on seeing and remembering
how it is.
If apples are suddenly falling, then they
are solid, when once they were just a thin scent rising
from the fields.
So even the best lit barn is a study
in half tones and their opposites.
She wonders, how did they discover lucules,
the brighter flecks at the center of the sun?
Could they ever see one thing again?
Could that person, who no longer has
to imagine universe and source, come back
to paint the north side of the wooden house?
All this, like someone waking in the dark.
The strands of light under her door
are a lamp left on by the man and woman talking
in the next room.
They sigh at the contrariness of children.
While outside, down the lane, the sickle moon
has just stopped over the orchard, indicating as much.
It is the edge of Papa's laugh sweeping through the trees
all night."
[APPLAUSE]