1.
Have we not been turning towards it at daybreak as if we depend on it
too, the way the sunflowers lift and tilt
their heads, slumped and closed down overnight, to face it eyeball to
eyeball, then without flinching to track the noon's white
blaze, the afternoon's blanket upon blanket of heat, and the swelling
fanfare of purples, the deafening orange din?
We are still elemental in our hungers. We sit at desks. Pastel walls
close in like envelopes, seal and for-
ward us. While coffee stands glazed with small prisms of oiled colors,
incessant phones wail down the measureless hall.
We are supervised every moment and the day is clocked into slices
that fit the office log, tagged and ent-
ered. Later driving home through meshes of traffic, sun glares us in
the eyes. The pavement swims on glassy washes
of heat. The windshield throbs. We accuse the sun of headache, thirst,
the piled-up accident alongside the road, whose
sirens follow and scream. As we slip down the home stretch, the street
lined with oaks and apartment parking lots, and stop,
in the rear-view mirror, the sun like a jovial wink looms at us yet:
reminder of tennis and picnic
and beach, and the hand pushed mower that the twelve year-old blistered
his palms on. His shirtless back in its pride of sweat,
hungry to drink deep to the bleached bone, bent to the sun, glad in its
touch. But its eye in the dark mirror's tilt burns
still, while earth in the tug of its orbit yearns to spin towards it
and be swallowed, at the same time massively it is hurtled away. We
are specks.
2.
The sun rides along winter cloudbanks, white like a soccer ball in
shallow still water, floating. Straight on, I track
it, it does not hurt my eyes. My slow route meanders towards it while
it floats over hills whose stripped oaks reach like claws.
I am running inside tireless sweat turning towards it. December mist
sets onto my glasses. Every few streets
I wipe them on the fleece of my shirt. Air too is fleecy and cool. My
face drinks. An entire hour bends me towards it,
towards where it rides, while, like a virus that comes first with a
flaring fever then disappears for a sudden space,
birds have sunk ino remission. Here in their silence my running awaits
their re-eruption: sparrow chatter,
doves. The white solar disc now pulsates so hard that my eyes no longer
bear to look. Veering off, I separate,
and through prisms of droplets, I stare forward. Each of us goes our
own way. Birds break into a squalling choir like claws across my ears
and it's day.
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