Sun on

 

Sun on 
What hides above us in the rinsed-out sky
that wind could school my heavy feet to fly?
Clouds keep their counsel, shy as girls who’ve learned
too well what happens when they meet the eye. Is everything this lush beneath the pavement—
inside the bolted chambers of the mind
does beauty thrust and pulse against the cement,
green, rank, alive, refusing to be blind? I feel it going down. I feel it move
all through this body like a tide in flood.
The sun is pitiless. It shines on love,
on concrete, longing, everything it’s touched. You struck my eyes like ordinary dawn,
a sudden rake of light across bare stone;
you took me under like a river in spate,
a slow landslide that claims the slope as home. This used to be air I breathed without a thought;
grass once lay down beneath indifferent trees.
The city is a vampire at the wires, taut,
sucking the current out of what still breathes— and still the sun, indifferent, generous,
insists on shining equally on us.