Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

Between Shade and Sun

strength. One resists while the other insists, and there is no meeting of qualities that each could appreciate and want to share. I am striking at myself to open and plant a tree or make room for my friend who then I could say was a close, loving companion, going with me wherever I must go.This is what it means to be alone. What keeps me intact after each strike is to know that my face has taken on the shape of each blow, and when I meet with others we measure our suffering at a glance. In deepest secret we are each other's subject of pain, thus truly as one. Between Shade and Sun I'm alive to prove the existence of death in me too, I'm alive to make death visible to myself and to others, and I think that to be alive with these thoughts is to be experiencing death at the same time. I go from one thought to the other as in a walk from the dark side to the sunlit and back to dark when the sun grows too hot for my uncovered head— uncovered in honor of the sun, when as it starts to burn my scalp I know it is time to move across the street and into shade. I walk until I tire of the cool, once more longing for the sun, as I gaze upon its brilliant pleasure in itself. I commute between two worlds and expect to succumb in time to one or the other, for if I linger in the sun too long the shade will come upon me from within and if I walk in shade I will grow cool as death, but having walked in both shade and sun I will have lived forever in seeing nothing change but variations in the change from shade to sun. 130 | Poems of the 1980s ...