Jeffrey Heath

Still Life With Lithium and Light

This morning, the honey caught
in the jar’s rim glows from within,
a cathedral window
rendered in clover and glass.

I watch it tremble
when I reach past,
hand not quite steady.
No grand lurch,
just the quiet rehearsal
of what I might become
by noon.

There are days I am
a house with all the lights on,
radiant, overdrawn.
The mirror won’t meet my eyes.
Emails bloom like algae,
texts left on read.
I pace the rooms
for no reason but momentum.

Then the dimmer switch draws down—
not darkness, exactly,
but a kind of unspeaking,
a silence lowered
over every gesture.

Still,
the coffee cup holds heat,
the shirts tumble dry.

Sometimes I think
the world forgives me
by being indifferent.
The tide doesn’t care
what shape the moon is in,
only that it keeps
its strange appointments.

I’ve come to rest in
the minor key of maintenance:
three white pills
quietly waiting
on the counter.

I’ve learned to say
today I am upright,
as though that
were a kind of prayer
to gravity,
to incandescence,
to the low, gold light
wobbling in the jar.