This week’s poem, by James Brasfield, offers a dream-like meditation on a grandfather, memory, and an ever-shifting sense of the world. I love this poem’s gentle veer between vivid tangibles—a stained veterinarian’s bag, a rack of blood samples—and a quiet, transcendent wondering. 

Brasfield is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Cove” (LSU Press, 2023). His work has appeared in Agni, The Café Review, Prairie Schooner, and other places. Twice a Senior Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

A Separate Light

Here, through conjured spheres
of place, or dream, for each alive
who knew him, my grandfather
wanders a separate light

to a hilltop cowbarn
in an August pasture and pauses with
his veterinarian’s bag,
clay stained from the trunk of his car
with its worn racks of red-stoppered tubes
to deliver to a lab at week’s end,
with the racked samples waiting at home
in a room smelling of blood.

When the day ends,
“To scald the hog,” he says,
he lowers his pale
fit body into his tub —

I wonder when
a carcinogen, nature’s fury,
took root . . . time,
the body’s abandonment
of mind, of a concept
of the universe:
a farmer’s, or my grandfather’s,
or mine in a pasture.

– James Brasfield

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “A Separate Light” ©2025 by James Brasfield, appears by permission of the author.