Shades and Illuminations

by Bruce Boston and G. O. Clark

Whether in good times or bad
lamp shades can soften the harsh light,
funneling it down onto a table or desk,
or spreading it across one's lap like a
familiar patchwork quilt, providing
comfort against the night.

An unshaded bulb can hurt the
eyes like the glare of the midday sun.
Building a lamp shade for the sun would
be like creating the perfect bottle
to hold the universal solvent.
We must wear the shades instead.

The lamp shades in my apartment
are flat white, casting an even glow upon
the darkness, all but the one of forest green
atop a bookshelf in the corner, like a clump
of ancient conifers filtering daylight
deep within a primeval forest.

The brief history of lamp shades
is not without its gruesome moments.
Commandants of the Third Reich
fashioned lamp shades from cured human
skins, imparting a warm and fleshly
glow to their reading pleasures.

My aunt collected lamp shades
from the trips she'd taken with my uncle,
Kodacolor dioramas of the Grand Canyon,
Yosemite, the Everglades, Niagara Falls.
When she gazed upon them long enough,
she saw her memories flowing.

Like snails and jet skis,
light has a limiting velocity,
a fact Einstein often put to good use
in his General Theory of Relativity.
Equations he would later come to regret.
Few lamp shades survived Hiroshima.

I once loved a woman who
had red lamp shades in her bedroom,
atop black porcelain lamps, one on either
side of the bed, a pair of dark quotation
marks enclosing the limits of
our transitory passion.

Mystics and madmen seek
a light unshaded by the everyday.
This white flash of illumination invokes
an ecstasy that traverses the soul of
both body and mind. Internal shades
fall like rows of dominoes.

Lamp shades at the funeral parlor
are lilac and printed with white lilies.
Soothing hymns shroud the reality of light
still further, comforting those left behind.
Shadows of the living and the dead meet
just beyond this faded glow.

Some claim the light bulbs of
the future will no longer need lamp
shades. They will screw directly into the
bases of our skulls, lighting the world we
survey without the slightest variation.
The dark is full of spurious notions.

Appeared in The Magazine of Speculative Poetry


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