When singing low on the night I encountered the brightness of a metal lamp
whose leverage gripped on my mind, so uncomfortably lifted, the longer I stared,
it grew, pressed up; then with a sudden violent leap, it uphove! unhinged
my thought, with such snapping dislocation that myself snapped, thundered back, foundered and failed,
my surroundings reduced to plain senseless arithmetic of black street,
black lamp,
black pole,
ones and ones
and colorless bleak things;
until on my back lying I saw me, stricken gazing still into the light that shone out,
round and radiant-- and that light transformed:
the night gone, that light racing itself across a hundred thousand multitudes,
that bent and waved as the field of clouds piled in bright sky
over which I flew, beaming, and saw the bands of light as avenues indefinite, clear,
yet as water, then warm air, trumpeting fresh and fair as daybreak, gold,
and crisper, more light and easy and lucid and free, harmonious,
remaining constant above those clouds to their very ends which were beyond me sent into the forever blue,
making cleanly visible each and every corner of dusk and gloom beneath, and them instantly removed
-- thus by light only transformed.