Sunrise, Sunset

Have you ever seen

anything

in your life

more wonderful

than the way the sun,

every evening,

relaxed and easy,

floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,

or the rumpled sea,

and is gone–

Mary Oliver, “The Sun”

What is Oliver’s poem really about?

I only ask because the poem came to mind as I was looking out the big bay window facing the river. I had read the poem so many times that it resided in me somewhere, probably inside my rib cage, on the left side, just above the sternum. But my skeleton is not the topic here; it’s the poem and the way it sketches the sun. (See quote above.)

It is noon, or thereabouts, and that means I can look back to catch the sun appearing. I can also look ahead, to catch the sun in muffled rush toward evening. I catch myself, too, running in the opposite direction.

The beginning and the end of the sun’s passage are really what we contemplate when we think of the yellow O that is visible more times than not. The middle of the passage is too harsh and glaring, aggressive on the eyes. We avoid it.

I don’t think that was Mary Oliver’s point, though. She threads the sun with the twenty four hours we use to measure our days. The thread feels eternal, as she describes it. It has many routes, and roots. It is a silky, sliding thread we can depend on to be distant and beautiful, untouchably perfect. It is not staring at us and prefers to follow its own path… it keeps on moving…

and into the clouds or the hills, 

or the rumpled sea, 

and is gone– 

and how it slides again

out of the blackness, 

every morning, 

on the other side of the world, 

like a red flower

It is nevertheless not without texture and a viscosity we too wish to have, demanding we see its presence, feel its absence, while it is busy

streaming upward on its heavenly oils, 

say, on a morning in early summer, 

at its perfect imperial distance– 

and have you ever felt for anything 

such wild love– 

And so as I stand and look, I know I am between two suns, but that is not painful because they have always been juxtaposed in my thought. Between both of them, and gasping from love of one as well as the other. A madwoman nobody knows about, because I look, but never speak. A sheet of light hovers in my sky.

According to Oliver, the sun, whether with us or not, is … well, a word of great potency, pure joy:

do you think there is anywhere, in any language, 

a word billowing enough 

for the pleasure 

that fills you, 

as the sun 

reaches out, 

as it warms you 

as you stand there, 

empty-handed-- 

And so I stand here, hands open and filled with everything. Not an object. Everything. I am not empty-handed. Not as long as there is air.

Yes, I have given it my all, have tried to think like a great poet has done, and of course I have fallen short. That leaves me with myself and I to figure out where the sun is going, and I really don’t care. It has a path and I don’t. All I can do is watch and think. And since I have seen far more sunsets than sunrises, I guess I should choose the former. I have to do something with this middle of the day that I have been given.

I will look forward, to the end of this day, when the things around us all move toward the horizon. The sun is a magnet and the earth its blanket, creeping, drawn toward it, over the shoulders of its orb. We are fortunate to just stand and watch and not be sucked along with it.

There is a reason I say this. Allow me to explain. It will only take a minute. It’s because of what happened to me as a child, before I could talk about sunsets, when nothing was real if it was beyond my brief reach.

Nothing but the river, its islands, its sun. A torture planned by my parents, who must have hated me and so encased me in this view that needs water to be visible. Needs that river, the only one that matters.

After watching the sunset over the St. Lawrence River, all the rest of the sunsets are just photocopies. How did I know that would happen when the colors entered my retinas forever? I didn’t know, of course. I was little, innocent, waiting for the world to leave its imprint on me, and unaware of what that meant. My parents were cruel, and they put me there, facing the boathouse, the dock, the shore, the deep water with its unforgiving current.

I have no visible tattoos and will never have any, but the sun over that palimpsest of things and thoughts inked its yellow-apricot-cyan on me when I had no ability to resist it. The streaked sky was painfully beautiful before I ever knew pain. It was eternal before I knew eternity was a lie. It was beautiful when the world was still aglow with beauty. It was all I knew. It was where sunsets happened, on that border between the US and Canada, the edge of my known world.

I could say that ever since then I have hated the world. Since then everything has gone downhill. Nothing has glowed, nothing has been the right degree of warm. I could say that, and it would be true, alI wish it weren’t so. There is a reason.

Since then, sunsets have been sad. No, they have been heart wrenching. The gold and apricot and cerulean clutch at my fibers and yank, hard. They say come back to me, insinuating that I am a traitor, and I insist that I have never left, am still standing on the bank of the mighty river that loved me almost as much as I loved it. The river I left but that didn’t leave me. 

It feels like all my fingernails have been ripped out, but it’s only the result of running my hands over the pane of the window where it is still noon.

I admit to having abandoned the river until the time, years later, when I crossed it again at a point many miles to the east - it’s a big, long river - and realized it was the same river. I exploded in tears, no longer a small child and driving a car, and all I could do was metaphorically explode. It didn’t look like the same river and there was no sunset around, but none of that mattered. Crossing the St. Lawrence was something I had never done and finally it had happened. I wondered what the Rubicon had felt when it was crossed.

I was in agony. I could not touch it or feel it, and cursed the sun that was shining that April when the St. Lawrence returned. When I returned, useless as the bridge that offered passage over it to the other side.

The point is that St. Lawrence ruined my ability to enjoy a sunset, any sunset. I can stand all I want by my big bay window and can look off to the left, which must be the west. Everything is where it should be, everything but the river and me. I feel lost. And then I hear it:

or have you too 

turned from this world-- 

or have you too 

gone crazy 

for power, 

for things?

Mary, I have done my best, and have really not turned away at all. I have no power, and very few things

It’s just the way things have taken me away from the little girl and her eyes. Things that have shaped her life in ways she didn’t plan or want.

Still, a river runs through it, always. And a sun comes up and goes down, always. A different sun, but a sun after all.