Daylight by Bobby C. Rogers

God is proven in some way by the extreme difficulty of believing in him...--Simone Well

July already, and the land is soon to burn, the sun at midday casting
its least shadow. Across the road, the unmown pasture will whiten
under its glare, and the world goes brittle with heat.
The land loves the light, and suffers from the light, and lets it go
when the day is done. The illuminated air has a density, and I feel
as though I should part it with my hands when I step from the shade.
You don't have to look hard to see what the light is always leaving--
even rising towards you, taking its lowest angle down the countryside,
it is passing. The days should be getting shorter but I can't sense it
in the slow coursing of this one. It is difficult to believe
even the things you've seen; there is nothing that I know
for certain. A mockingbird lands on a post and has more to say
about what will bear us skyward than I do. The day is without music--
or any that is organized in a way I can hear. It is easy to forget
the words you've read in books and all you've been told is true
with the world this bright and close at hand. I am learning to look
with a new kind of wanting. There are a few minutes as the day dims
when the details in the distant line of trees become clarified,
the tree forms taking on greater depth, their lobed leaves individuated
as the light releases them, the rich texturing of each tree
suddenly present, rendered with a painstaking draftsmanship,
then they blacken and solidify, emptied of every last particular,
a jagged line backed by a sky which will stay brilliant for some time
to come, as though the light that once lay in the weeds now waits
in the air above, wondering, I suppose, why it is we do not follow.