WEBVTT

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This poem is a combination of--

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one of the wonderful
things about writing poetry

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is how all kinds of
tiny, little things

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converge into one
effort at least.

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And partly, it was
because I got to know

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a young, 15-year-old woman
who had a really rough life,

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and I was thinking
about how hard it

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was to be her when she'd
think things over at night.

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Also, I went through the
dictionary, which I love to do,

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and found the word
luminist, which originally

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applied to painters
who were particularly

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interested in light.

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And the third thing that perhaps
occurred to me before I wrote

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this poem was, somewhere in
Wallace Stevens' letters,

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he's questioning something--
maybe about the Saint Agnes Eve

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poem--

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where he's saying that
if moonlight comes

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through stained
glass in a church,

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it doesn't give color because
the type of light it is.

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I don't know if this is true.

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I haven't tried it out.

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It just makes light, but it
doesn't reflect the color

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like sunlight does.

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So this is a poem
where I imagine

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a young, pre-teenage
girl would wish

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to be a painter of some kind,
but she questions everything.

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It's called "The
Luminist at Age Eleven."

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"She's heard that apples
go silver in moonlight,

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that the lavender cloud
of phlox along the wall

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is absorbed by rocks, and
that even the steady village

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church is eaten away
on a night like this.

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They told her, when the moon
shines through a stained-glass

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window, there are
no reds or blues

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crossing the floor, that
the light is a kind of air.

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She pictures her foot
lifting and vanishing

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through wet grass.

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First this, then that, depends
on seeing and remembering

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how it is.

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If apples are suddenly
falling, then they

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are solid, when once they
were just a thin scent rising

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from the fields.

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So even the best
lit barn is a study

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in half tones and
their opposites.

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She wonders, how did
they discover lucules,

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the brighter flecks at
the center of the sun?

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Could they ever see
one thing again?

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Could that person,
who no longer has

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to imagine universe
and source, come back

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to paint the north side
of the wooden house?

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All this, like someone
waking in the dark.

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The strands of
light under her door

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are a lamp left on by
the man and woman talking

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in the next room.

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They sigh at the
contrariness of children.

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While outside, down the
lane, the sickle moon

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has just stopped over the
orchard, indicating as much.

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It is the edge of Papa's laugh
sweeping through the trees

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all night."

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[APPLAUSE]

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