Honest Light

This is the hour that has no manners.
The light does not arrange you.
The light reports you.

And what it reports,
the line beside your mouth
that was not there when I met you.
The gray thread in your hair
that catches the sun
like a wire catches current,
live and thin and charged.

You are not the person I imagined
this morning, face still soft
with the democracy of sleep.
You are the person the afternoon
has no reason to flatter,
and the fact of you unflattering
is so precise, so specific,
so absent of apology
that I feel something close to awe.

I have loved the beautiful version.
The afternoon asks a harder question,
can I love the true one.

It's not harder.
Nor difficult.
It's Different.
Closer.