The Sun's Leaving--Blog Entry #9

Sunday, April 7, 2013

10:00am

68˚F

Today I am not alone. The sun finally drove his bulged body out of the dark mouth of the sky like a swollen tongue to meet me. We didn’t plan it, although I heard he was coming. Everyone kept saying, any day now he will be here, we will see him float down and set himself on fire right there in front of us. It will be beautiful, they kept saying.

Everyone always forgets how fast he leaves us. How one morning he just won’t show up for breakfast and no one will ask where he is or if he is running late. Everyone will just accept his leaving as if we didn't need him. As if we didn't need our largest star, our greatest energy source.   

I am different than the others. I am hard on the sun. I scorn his scorched body every time he reappears to me. You’ve left me alone for so long, I say to him, you’ve left this cemetery to the misery of the empty sky. He will push out his large orange chest at me and break my stare. There is no one watching over the hole you’ve left behind, I warn him. You better be careful that some one doesn’t come by and plug it up with a bucket full of blue or black for good.  

What will happen when the sun dies? Astronomers say it will be cosmic chaos. It will not be like dying at all. When the sun reaches his last stage in stellar evolution he will begin to spiral out of control like being born again, seeing everything for the first time but in fast motion. The sun will bloat like a daylily in bloom, but much more violent as he sweeps through the inner solar system. He will enter into a brief helium-burning phase, sucking up Mercury and Venus in his rage. And then he will come for us—he will swallow up his dark hole with the left over light he saved from his leavings.

I trust the sun will give us our warning. I trust the astronomers' prediction, that it will be billions of years before he turns on us. For now, I sit and watch him warm the head stones and reflect them into the sky. Watch the mallard ducks fly under him and crisp their wings with his burning skin. Down here it seems like they are flying right into his center and he is releasing them like fire arrows onto the earth below.

As I stare at the sun from this cemetery, I imagine all the bodies staring up with me, squeezing their eyes to steal a glimpse of his shine. I imagine that is what gives the sun its color—all of our eyes melding into him like pieces of agitate crystal. 

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The Sun's Leaving--Blog Entry #9 Inspired By:

Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun

 By Walt Whitman

1 GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;
Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;	5
Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars;
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers, where I can walk undisturb’d;
Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman, of whom I should never tire;
Give me a perfect child—give me, away, aside from the noise of the world, a rural, domestic life;
Give me to warble spontaneous songs, reliev’d, recluse by myself, for my own ears only;	10
Give me solitude—give me Nature—give me again, O Nature, your primal sanities!
—These, demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and rack’d by the war-strife;)
These to procure, incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,
While yet incessantly asking, still I adhere to my city;
Day upon day, and year upon year, O city, walking your streets,	15
Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time, refusing to give me up;
Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul—you give me forever faces;
(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries;
I see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for.)
2 Keep your splendid, silent sun;	20
Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods;
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards;
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!	25
Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments—some, starting away, flush’d and reckless;
Some, their time up, returning, with thinn’d ranks—young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)	30
—Give me the shores and the wharves heavy-fringed with the black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life! O full to repletion, and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torch-light procession!
The dense brigade, bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following;	35
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants;
Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs, with the beating drums, as now;
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded;)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus—with varied chorus, and light of the sparkling eyes;
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.