The Age of Light

Dew had started to settle, sleeping bag
flaps gone clammy on the lawn while we
three talked about stars under stars, the old light
already enroute to meet us later, grown
and out with girls. This was boys, summer, eleven,
twelve and twelve. We thought that starlight
older than all of us, in the mail before we were born.
I've savored an image of long trains of photons
coming on through the night, the future on its way
like fast freight across an interstellar prairie.

Now they say it's two years, max. No photon stays
uninvolved longer than that and that only out
in the big intergalactic dark with hydrogen atoms
so sparse per parsec they almost never meet. Still,
in the space of two lightyears these lonesome photons
meet someone, some lone electron in all probability
somewhere specific around a proton. The electron, excited
by a packet in the mail, leaps to embrace
the possibility of light, only to extinguish it
in its own unstable enthusiasm. The interaction
proceeds with delicate abandon.

Eventually electrons fall back to more likely orbit.
Light emerges from each surrender. This is called
resonant scattering, when the frequency of light
is such that the atom just rings, a tiny bell
whose one tone is another photon. A new photon.
This is what air does, what glass does with wavelengths
from seven to four hundred nanometers, a narrow band
but wide enough to see through.

Nonresonant scattering's just bump in the night,
reflection, absorption, photons gone to heat.

I guess it's the info that's old. The new light still
means a star there long and far ago. I'd been raving
the death of info, how photons are messages
pony-expressed all the way from Arcturus, letters
to Resident, Occupant, most of which fall in the dirt,
kamikaze dive into water or stone. No one home.

She said, "You look at the dark side. It's the birth
of new information." Reminding me of spectroscopy.
This is tweed's trick, subtractive sculpture, absorb
everything that doesn't look like purple threads
in a tailored shoulder. We know of light's source
from the light that survives. We know where light's been
by what's gone.

I explained some of this to a guy in a bar. He said, "That means
light's reborn more times in the vitreous humor of the eye
than it is in the space between Andromeda and the Milky Way."
He sipped his drink, photons from the neon beer signs busy
reconstituting in the heel of his glass. "I like that," he said.
Me too. The eye that big. Light that fresh. News that current.