The Black Sun

The Black Sun

1.
I sit far back from the center where people walk
their strollers and throw frisbees. Depending on what
the wind is saying I sit in or out of the late afternoon sun.
A small pool beside me collects coins. My focal point
is a big round polished piece of black granite,
an obelisk rolled upon itself glazed and lumpy
like a chocolate donut. It must have arranged my chair.
I survey the orange and red flowers in rows,
the reservoir, the redwoods, and after each in turn
I’m returned to Noguchi's Black Sun.

2.
Back a second hotter day I take the same chair.
The fountain is raucous. I smell chlorine in cool
mist when the breeze shifts. A woman spreads
a towel on the green lawn. She rolls up her shorts
and kicks off her sandals. I guess she's near Jack’s
age if he were here. Broader views contain more
bare shoulders and frisbees and trees, but the black
stone fills the same still space within me. You ask
me to say goodbye to Jack--an act of kindness--
a happiness project. I know your request is rhetorical.
Shadows track the listing earth day by day around
the sun. Jack is far away and moves as the sun
moves. If he could hear me would I say goodbye?

3.
My chair is occupied when I finally get here.
A neighborly lecture on street side parking
soured my sour mood. The lawn has browned.
The sun not the sculpture selects my new chair.
I seek relief in shadows from other people.
Blocked by a tree what does the Black Sun say
now? Last night I had two dreams. Jack is young.
We are on an ocean liner. Jack falls over the side;
I jump in after. In the other he wants to explore
dark and narrow steps leading underground. I fear
the dank cramped space--no room to turn and find
the sky. Don't go far, I say. I fear I won’t follow
when his fears awaken and I hear Papa? And towels!
To keep him clean! He wants five—I let him take three.
In my goddamn dream! The Black Sun is a ridiculous
metaphor for what it is like for years to lose your son.
It is cold and dead. Through its aperture, I can’t see
Jack's ashes on Hurricane Ridge. There is a reason
why mountains appear blue and blur in the distance.
Color disperses, contrast softens, background bleeds
through, and blue, blue light comes faster.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason. - Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel Lecture