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self-published
21 August 2017

The sun and the moon meet.

I wrote this poem before the 21 August 2017 solar eclipse. I haven’t seen many eclipses, but I wanted to try to capture something of the experience, even before it happened that day. I found something romantic, hopeful, and heartbreaking in imagining the geometry of an eclipse.

I’ve seen the eclipse already.
I’ve seen how it begins:
the radiant sun, the vanished
moon. See how they are going
to collide, the many decisions
the moon made, the sun in its
place and bright and not waiting,
but willing. I’ve seen the introduction
by the sky, the first tentative kiss,
the way it can flare. The way these two
spend their two hours together: intensify,
more colors than imagined, gray and blue and yellow,
white, too bright, scalding, frigid passage of time
together, orbits constrained to a circle and collapsing
in, leaving everyone else outside, in the dark,
afraid, unprepared, caught in traffic, under
moon and sun timid reconsidering recoiling
while sleeping birds cry out in alarm
and howling coyotes transform into humans,
into bats, into umbrellas, and whine when
they are coyote again. How they pull
apart, not easily, with great pain,
groping, mistaking legs for fingers,
tripping, huddling, finding stars
in the vastness, making a run
for it. Get away from me!
Apart. Hot and cold. Lonely.
Remember those good times?
Remember how they kept coming,
these eclipses, these holes
in the sky, brief beginnings
and long endings? It’s there
behind your eyes and mine,
the twirl never-ending.
So brief.