Sun Box

after Joseph Cornell’s “Suzy’s Sun” 

In the beginning
on a bench
beside a river,
currents like moissanite facets
jumping crests, we were two
old souls
that only the sun
could know,
hot blazing pillars
of photons through
water vapor and dust
illuminating us like a
spotlight—
not white godspot,
but a free-range egg yolk
or blood orange rind’s
blush ribbons—
in a tragicomic play
about fleetingly happy
people.

I imagined this beam
was the yellow brick runway
to heaven, a spring
afternoon
suddenly turned summer,
and with closed eyes I could
feel skin cells trigger
nerve endings,
melanocytes packaging
melanosomes as I listened to
your anecdote
about a raspy voiced
soothsayer’s phone call,
my head on your chest
for seven sensuous thumps.
Your words fluttered
into cattails, phragmites
and pond weed
along the frame’s edge, and a
barge
floated a city
of massive red crates
holding our wildest ideas.

From the vantage point
of subsequent seasons,
understanding that no one
can belong to anything but
the elements,
we’ve staked out
our shared history
where I can predict
what you might say or think,
and that to hurt
you
would be to wound myself
with a dart dipped in
foxglove.

Our curled toes
balance on separate rods
extracted from
antique clocks, and just
when the distance
seems unbreachable
as the cold cork
moon to the stars,
and I lay like a child pining
for a lost doll,
the tide washes up two seashell
ears that receive each other’s
oracles.

Tucked in bubble wrap
of the brain’s attic
will remain
the memory of this box,
time fixed
on a driftwood bench
near a river with ducks
and two sketched figures,
one with a cheek
to the other’s heart
as water lapped at stones
and the sun brilliantly
shone.

View the original art here.