This Light

This green fills with gray, a kind of light
            that’s hard to breathe if
            you’ve had enough of this
            day, this moment, this life
            which is exactly the problem.
We reach towards a color as if
            it might be something,
            something more
            like being with someone,
            what we call an embrace,
            perhaps, but perhaps not,
            perhaps a trap, a noose.
Sometimes, though, it will be,
            this light resembling gray,
            not what we thought at all
            but something else entirely
            and, quite probably, worse.

Credit

From dispatch from the mountain state (West Virginia University Press, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Marc Harshman. Published by permission of the publisher.