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Page 144

It's July 5th. Last night, lazy, we watched
(for a few seconds before clicking to something
with a story) fireworks on TV, no doubt
magnificent in the real sky, but on TV
nothing is brighter than a white spot on the gray screen.
It's like an oil-painting of the sun: the viewer
must create all the magic, and why should he?

How magnificent my poems would be
if the blankness they decorated
were the sun -- if you could bear
to read them there, these, my little
sun spots.

How odd that we spend our lives
beneath a sky that contains a light
that we must not look at. Science tells us
it is the source of life, of all warmth
and wind and energy. And, I suppose,
of all our poems (mental sunburns? Solar flares?).
And yet...

well, if I told you I remember (even hazily)
how we created suns, you'd think me nuts,
but if I am, it must be the sun -- which (if I'm nuts
to imagine you and I can create suns)
moves us all, even our thought -- it must be the sun
that's nuts.

Speaking of last night, what boots it to be
independent of olde England if we must be
slaves to the sun -- the even older sun,
for there is nothing new
over us.

Note: The lives of bodies must depend on the sun, but I doubt that the life that is us is younger than the sun, even if England is. The reasoning in stanza 4 is that if the sun is source of all life on earth, it is responsible for any crazy idea I have (that, for example, something we are is older than suns and may have contributed to their creation); or if we do transcend physical limits, then my idea isn't so crazy. So either I'm right, or if not, blame the sun. Does my logic stun? Nuts! (Please note the sunny palindrome: "stun nuts".)

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