Small Poems for the Winter Solstice
** Margaret Atwood **
1
A clean page: what
shines in you is not nothing,
though equally clear and blue

and I'm old enough to know
I ought to give up wanting
to touch that shining.

What shines anyway?
Stars, cut glass, and water,
and you in your serene blue shirt

standing beside a window
while it rains, nothing
much going on, intangible.

To put your hand
into the light reveals
the hand but the light also:
shining is where they touch.

Other things made of light:
hallucinations and angels.
If I reach my hands
into you, will you vanish?