Chiaroscuro: an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on something.

We are endlessly entertained and fascinated by the play of light in and about The Little Hacienda. The house, being fortuitously oriented east-west, with a raft of seventy-year-old casement windows, is well-lit all day, but especially in morning and late afternoon. For most of the year the sun tracks a diagonal path over the house, from its furthermost point south at the Winter Solstice, to a point just a few degrees north of our front door at the Summer Solstice. With nothing to block or alter its entry, morning sunlight floods from the ocean through the doorway and front windows, defining peaks and valleys in the stucco walls, illuminating with a soft glow random objects in the narrow galley kitchen, and here, by the door, a bookcase of ripening mangos. In late afternoon, the light is filtered by the leaves of trees behind the house, creating a slowly changing tableau, with occasionally stunning results, as seen in the photo of the pepper shaker, an image that found its way into the poem below.

“Chiaroscuro” first appeared in Sojourner Magazine. Again, it grew out of an attempt to coalesce and focus several lines of thought and observations dancing about simultaneously, specifically the play of light in the house, and contemplation of the lives and writings of the Desert Fathers, Christian monks of the fourth and fifth centuries, who left civilization for communion with God in the Egyptian desert. The technical painting term, chiaroscuro, tied the two together for me.

Chiaroscuro

The back-lit morning wave,
Clarified emerald suddenly in olive,
Then gone; forever the cry of the Christ’s torso
In Ruben’s Elevation of the Cross;
A glass pepper shaker filled to overflowing
By a finger of fallen sun at the close
Of a most mundane afternoon.
Obsessed is perhaps too strong a word
But I seek the image of emergent light
In everything, as if a life’s collection
Of a thousand thousand such events
Becomes, finally and somehow,
Through the slippery spirit’s incomprehensible means,
A perfect surrender.  The desert hermit Antony
Is said to have needed no lamp
To read Scripture in his cell at night, so bright
Was the manifest glow of his abandon.