Blue Lights
New Year’s Day 2004
As a small boy, I saw blue lights.
They would call me when my parents were asleep.
I knew their voice, and would greet them in the small hours
in their home in the gold drapes, as they
flickered phosphorescent
on that great pane window,
a giant oak of cat perches
and the murmur of Lake Ronkonkoma
their theatrical ambiance.
The blue lights went away,
along with many of the carnival moments of childhood.
I attributed their ephemeral existence
to my mother’s career as a freelance
psychic. I thought they had skidded off the ouija board or
too many oily palms read or had been poisoned by those
musty tea leaves or even conjured up and then dismissed by a
séance gone awry.
Forty years later, I am sitting in a small church
meditating on the Gospel
a thunderous Pacific storm in my ears
a chalkboard begging for gnosis in
my closed eyes. Then the chalkboard turns into
papyrus burning with the same blue lights that had
left me in our home by the lake.
I then knew that the blue lights were angels.