Changing a Lightbulb
after Cortazor
This is the ladder, your first steps into the height. There are no apples. There are no angels, there is only broken shadow and socket. Now, as you un-turn, with fingertips only, listen for the sand. It is sand from the ancestral beach where all families of glass are blown. A beach where dinosaurs are continually struck by lightning. Continue swiveling the blown-out bulb from its golden threads (save for use in the darkroom) and hand it to someone. Next time you change a lightbulb, have that person with you. At five feet above the floor, in a room where many lightbulbs have been changed before, you will be overcome to sing the old time gospel ditty, “Oh tiny, tiny filament, jiggling, jiggling loose in thou rounded house of milk, how dost thou in His ceiling residential covet insects to their demise like a siren?” The moon will be staring at you through the window, but pay no mind. Do not look down, use the eyes in your shoe to find the bottom rung. Place the old bulb in the dish of pears. The new carton of bulbs are sleeping close by. Unwrap the new born from its onion skin pajamas and ascend the same ladder previous. Using your musical hand, insert the threaded end up into the unthreaded beginning. Turn gently in the direction of sunrise. Because you left the switch on, God’s echoing equation should be singing. Squint and descend.
—Stephen Lindow
Stephen Lindow took an MFA from Univ. Mass-Amherst and has taught four years of middle school. In spring he’ll teach english in South Korea. He is working on his first book of poems and will begin extensive exploration of Toronto’s storm drains in fall.
“There is no good nonsense without sense” —-Gertrude Stein
