Today's poem is by John A. Nieves

Note From Apparent Magnitude to Luminosity
       

Take a second to disregard the yawning pupils
of the telescope-tethered. I know you've been busy

with energy, energy, energy—how much something
puts out, how to measure it. I want for a second to ask:

what does all that output matter if everyone else is
too far away to sample the shine? Look, I remember

that summer I woke up one day and you had
inexplicably dimmed 70.25%. It wasn't just

observable as less shedding of charged particles,
I could see myself through you in the mirror. When I called

for breakfast, you walked through the couch. The closer you
got to me, the clearer you became—I could again see the lines

of your face as ghost currents, as the worry of week-late
rent. But as you backed away, you were just the AC wisping

the sediment of the room, asking the shadows if shadow
were a function of brightness or the gulf between light

and what eats it. After a few days you brightened again. It
probably had to do with a series of late-night phone calls

or a letter you got you pressed close to your chest. Not this letter,
not that time, like brightness couldn't be relative, but I would have

recognized my own handwriting. Anyway, with your normal
gleam restored you drifted out the door, down the highway,

not nearly as bright as the shadow you had just been, not nearly
anything I could measure without interval, without the wide

gap between observation and location, the intimate comparison
of what one throws off and what another can catch.

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Copyright © 2023 John A. Nieves All rights reserved
from Sugar House Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission