Shuri Kido's "A Tiny Little Equation" (translated by Tomoyuki Endo & Forrest Gander)

Thoughts on a season of light.

A Tiny Little Equation

For whom is (the evening glow)
                                        "red"?
To human eyes,
                    the red wavelength shimmering in the air
                                                                 is reflected,
but to the eyes of birds
which recognize even ultraviolet rays,
the evening glow looks much paler.
And when all the lives on Earth are finally snuffed out,
and the human solstice has passed,
every color will cease to "exist."
As clouds pile up densely above the sea,
kids get restless
feeling some sort of invitation.
On such occasions, when you're unable to read a "book"
while splashing around in the sea or river
as though dancing with water gods,
you'll notice beads of water on your skin
reflecting the world.
In such an optical play,
                                        the summer vanishes;
some people have gone off
with the water gods
and have never come back.
Textbooks, left on a desk unopened,
hold on to their tiny equations.
When each and every living thing has lost its life
and there remains not a single being,
for whom is (the evening glow)
                                        "red"?


from Names and Rivers (Copper Canyon, 2022)

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This is one of my favorite times of the year. In the morning, before school, I hop on my bike or head out for a run at 5:30 in the morning, and it is so dark that the stars and satellites are still little blinking lights in the sky above my head. And I am, in such moments, a lamplit thing moving through it all. I love those early minutes that become hours, as the city wakes up around me, and as one by one I see each one of the thousands of windows surrounding me turn from a shadowed thing to a yellowed thing, a tiny square of gold in the blueblack world. And finally, at some point mid-run or mid-bike, it is as if the dawn flickers itself on. A tricky switch of the sky, and, with a suddenness that I can only associate with something as mystifying and welcoming as grace, the sky becomes a parade of orange, a reddish, pinkish blush that gently streaks above me. Hello. Good morning.

It looks, in the end, like this.

And so, I am thinking about this poem today because I am thinking about light. We are in a season of light. It’s a season of dawns that stretch a blanket of orange across the cool dark of whatever night remains, and a season of sunsets that pull the light away with a magic trick of the senses, a trick that turns the clouds purple and makes you wonder what color is, or what anything is at all. And how it comes about. And why it comes. And how it remains. And why it never stays.

Here, once again, is this poem’s final question:

When each and every living thing has lost its life
and there remains not a single being,
for whom is (the evening glow)
                                        "red"?

I think — and I am thinking about this because we are in that season of light, that season of dawns and sunsets so beautiful that you forget, for a second, where you are — that the answer to this question that Shuri Kido so wonderfully asks is that none of this is for us. We can see it, yes. We can see the evening glow. The redness of it all. But it’s not for us. And I think, maybe, that that’s part of the beauty of it all.

I want to spend, selfishly, most of this little essay today talking about light. I want to talk about light because, yes, selfishly, it is my favorite thing. I want to talk about it because, after having checked out Kido’s book from the library, and flipping to this page, I was walking under a sky so wildly and unmistakably blue that it turned the page of the poem into a granular thing, something so ridged and textured that I knew it had been made. And I walked and read under that blue sky and was thankful for the light that this poem describes.

What does the poet Russell Edson say? Here is what he says:

Something about the light! He begins to cry . . .

Or Larry Levis. What does he say? Here is what he says:

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

It’s light, often, that makes me notice. And it’s noticing, often, that makes me want to remember.

In another of his poems, “Kozukata (The Road Never to Be Taken),” Kiro writes:

Folding your fingers one by one:
the pale spring,
the ruby summer,
the white autumn,
the dark winter.
Are they seasons
or the episodes of a life?
And you, with your pinky still unfolded, say,
"That's all that's given."
You're alive in this now, in this world.

You’re alive in this now, in this world. This, to me, captures what it means to offer your attention to light — to be struck by it, to be enlivened by it, to be illuminated. It makes you — light does — remember that you are alive now. That you are in this world, and not in another. It makes me grateful.

There’s a poem by Ross Gay, “Overheard,” that reads in full:

It’s a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I’ve learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It’s a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother’s heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It’s a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.

What I love about Kiro’s poem today is that it frames the fact of light — as we see it — as a thing that we see in a way that only we can. He writes:

To human eyes,
                    the red wavelength shimmering in the air
                                                                 is reflected,
but to the eyes of birds
which recognize even ultraviolet rays,
the evening glow looks much paler.

And so, the question arises, why not share in this spectacle that we experience in a singularly unique way together, especially as we feel and notice and see and think so much else, so much differently from one another? And that’s what Ross Gay speaks toward in his poem above. He writes of how geared his speaker is toward ignoring others (“I’ve learned to close my ears”) and yet how, once he does offer his attention, what he hears is not about something that defines his individual experience (“never did he say forget the crick in your neck”), but rather about something that defines his shared experience with someone else:

he said It’s a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light

That’s what light does, too. It reminds us of what we share. Because it is something we share. We share it equally because it shines on us equally, and we see it each in our own way, yes, but also together in the same way. It is some great and hopeful unifier, light is; it is something that, wildly, is not made for us — as today’s poem reminds me — and yet is still seen by us in a way that only we can see it.

By the way, that disbelief there, at the end of Gay’s poem above? It echoes the aforementioned poem by Larry Levis, where he writes:

Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief

It’s a beautiful feeling, disbelief, isn’t it? It might seem like it’s not. But it is, right? Because inherent in such a feeling is still that word, belief. Inherent in that feeling is a sense that you can’t quite comprehend what you are seeing, and yet you are seeing it. It’s like belief inverted. With belief, you can't see what you want to see, and so you have to believe. And with disbelief, you can see what you are seeing, and yet you can’t quite believe yourself, or the world, or both. Both words — belief and disbelief — show that this notion of belief — of incomprehensibility, of mystery — is at the heart of our experience. To acknowledge it, then, and to find joy in it — there’s something beautiful about that.

It’s why I love Edson’s quote above. Something about the light! He begins to cry. He can’t quite pinpoint it; he shouldn’t have to. It’s belief and disbelief wrapped up in one. It’s the fact of seeing and the mystery of what is seen. It’s something about the light, something beyond words but wrapped up in feeling. We share that, I think. We share that same capacity to feel whatever cannot be said but still can be shared.

And that’s why I am thinking of light lately. This time of year is a time of dawns and sunsets, of — recently — shimmering blankets of purple twisting in the heavens above. When I run in the morning, I often do laps of the reservoir in Central Park, where sometimes I notice a man walking in the opposite direction, picking chestnuts off the cinder path. And as morning arrives, it almost melts over the buildings. I see it first in the windows on the city’s western side, reflecting the eastern light, and then I see it in the mirror-like surface of the flat water, and then, finally, I see it in the sky. It’s this stretching, yawning, miraculous thing, the kind of thing that makes you believe, briefly, in the possibility of a morning that lasts forever. And that — a morning that lasts forever — is another definition of hope, if you’re looking for one.

And I think I am looking for one. And I think I am looking for one because I want to know what binds us. Kido’s poem today makes me notice that, though the morning light is not made for us, we can see it in a way that only we can. The fact of that togetherness of seeing — that binds us, I think. Did you see that, we say. Can you believe that, we say. This togetherness of seeing and feeling is true of other things, as well. It’s true of belief, I imagine. And hope, too. In that we believe like only we can. It’s true of our capacities for delusion and our capacities for destruction and our capacities for imagination and our capacities for love. And so light reminds me of our humility and our capacity. That feels important now.

Just the other day, I was re-reading the early draft of a thing I started working on awhile ago, and now might continue to work on. I think I will. In it, an older man reflects on his daughter’s first encounter with a computer’s search engine. Scared of all the answers she might encounter in that infinite space, he asks her what she searched for, and what she found. Here’s what she says.

Did you know, she said, that the colors are different sizes. Did you know that blue is the shortest and that’s why the sky is blue? Because when the sun is right here above us the light doesn’t have to go that far? So it chooses the color blue? But when the light has to go really far, like when it’s on the other side of the world, then it chooses a different color, because there are other colors that are longer? Like red or orange or other sunset colors? Did you know that? It’s like the sun has a bunch of outfits, and it knows which one is good for what it’s about to do.

Did you know, she said, that even though the clouds in the sky are made of water, they still don’t fall? They say that everything falls because of gravity, but then I wondered why don’t clouds fall to the ground? It’s because they are made of really small drops of water that are light enough for the air to hold. And it’s because the air sometimes goes up, and it keeps the small drops of water in the sky. It’s like there’s an invisible man balancing a ball on his finger. And he’s the air and the ball he’s holding is a cloud. He has a lot of fingers and each one is balancing a ball on them.

Funny, how, in this world, which is a world we share, there’s always something about the light.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. In a recent newsletter, I wrote about the poetry of Marcellus Williams. If you feel moved, you can donate to the Midwest Innocence Project, which worked to free Marcellus Williams, here. You can donate to the wider-reaching Innocence Project here.

2. I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

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