There may be some places the sun
never reaches--into the stamen
of a prairie primrose bud burned
and withered before blooming,
or into the eyes of a fetal
lamb killed before born.
I suppose
the sun could never shine by its own
light back beyond the moment
when it first congealed and ignited.
And
Mohammed, it is said, never showed
the inside of his mouth.
But
the sun is certainly present
in the black below the earth, shining
inside the surf and thriving minerals
of sycamore, beech and hickory roots.
Blind fishes at the perpetually sunless
sea bottom hold some daylight in their bodies
by the descending crab particles
and plankton crumbs they sift
through and swallow.
The
sun of ten million years previous
stabs and glimmers still in the suspended
beat of glacial bacteria, in salt
crystals frozen beneath miles of ice,
a discernible history of light.
Sun
off sunflowers gone
for a hundred years is yet here today
in paint on canvas, just as the radiance
of summer trout watched by Schubert
is the sound of sun now in notes
printed on a staff.
And
the sun may shine inside a rock
buried on the dark side of the moon,
if I imagine it there. It might illuminate
the buried night existing inside a dead
man's heart, if I say it is so.
If I
envision it, could the sun,
shining maybe at first only faintly
like a penny candle or with a light dim
as the light of the Weaver Star, reveal
the outlines of descending salvation
in an icy rain falling at midnight
through a still forest, the black edges
of atonement in the wooden blades
of the desert saltbush? I close
my eyes and turn in that direction
to see.
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