NOTE FROM APPARENT MAGNITUDE TO LUMINOSITY
Take a second to disregard the yawning pupils
of the telescope-tethered. I know you’ve been busy
with energy, energy, energy—how much something
puts out, how to measure it. I want for a second to ask:
what does all that output matter if everyone else is
too far away to sample the shine? Look, I remember
that summer I woke up one day and you had
inexplicably dimmed 70.25%. It wasn’t just
observable as less shedding of charged particles,
I could see myself through you in the mirror. When I called
for breakfast, you walked through the couch. The closer you
got to me, the clearer you became—I could again see the lines
of your face as ghost currents, as the worry of week-late
rent. But as you backed away, you were just the AC wisping
the sediment of the room, asking the shadows if shadow
were a function of brightness or the gulf between light
and what eats it. After a few days you brightened again. It
probably had to do with a series of late-night phone calls
or a letter you got you pressed close to your chest. Not this letter,
not that time, like brightness couldn’t be relative, but I would have
recognized my own handwriting. Anyway, with your normal
gleam restored you drifted out the door, down the highway,
not nearly as bright as the shadow you had just been, not nearly
anything I could measure without interval, without the wide
gap between observation and location, the intimate comparison
of what one throws off and what another can catch.
ABOUT THE POET
John A. Nieves is a hardcore Sugar House fan. He has poems forthcoming or
recently published in journals such as: North American Review, Copper Nickel,
32 Poems, Harvard Review, and Massachusetts Review. He won the Indiana
Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual
Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury
University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his MA from
University of South Florida and his PhD from the University of Missouri.
ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
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