The Sun in Everything

Still,

Nothing's as good

Not as warm as your skin

On mine

I.

This morning the sun was in everything

I felt it, in me

Everywhere I looked the light shone out

You would've seen it too:

A ten-year-old boy waiting for the bus, rocking

back and forth on a manhole to hear the metal clack;

A violet the size of my thumb neon blue-deep purple and black with a yellow heart,

growing out of the building’s corner where brick met pavement;

Watching from behind and backlit, a dog's tail wagging slow then quick as its owner

reached down to pat its head mid-walk;

The goddamn holy gold of leaves that should be green, imbued with so much sun

they changed color just for the morning;

The heat in my car from sitting for the first few hours of the sun's day, it wrapping around me

the way you used to do, while I stretched in bed and you

curled, woolybear round the finger of my core;

The sweep of a red-winged blackbird low over the road and then

tacked sideways on a reed,

the easy slip of red into this realm from the other for the space of a second -- so sudden a flash of beauty

I gasped

II.

What I can't understand is how I know -- for a fact,

it couldn't be more real --

You felt that sun once as much as I do now,

Felt it in you, not apart

It filled you and shone out

Days when the sky was full blue and bright and you

Could see up through to the top of it and float

 You prefer clear blue skies, empty, no clouds

What a thing to ask for - to demand: happiness

without context

As if the blue skies might never meet the horizon

I could still feel the warmth in your skin, even as you grew dark,

Even as you stopped crying for the sky, stopped asking for blue and wonder

You looked in your hands and thought they were empty

Couldn't see the sun pouring out

Thought, in order to share, you needed something to hold

It’s not as simple as a bell being struck just once

or the lamp lit

And never burning out

I remember the day I complained about the pothole on our street and what righteous anger I felt that it continued to trick and shock me every day, indignant, surprised and jolted, the burst of passion I felt as I berated myself for forgetting, the car’s entire frame,

my body’s entire frame,

shaken.

You told me you hadn't seen me so awake in weeks.

III.

The skin of the sun

Pressed up against my shoulder, heating down

to my stomach, my chest,

the creases of my palms,

I try to account for it:

The light in you

The light out of you

The life

Then dark

Then light again

And it makes the death unbelievable

Christie Flemming