Sun

Ah Sun!
Burning away the dark
damp cling of the
Styx crossing.

"The life of each night's
death,"
"The death of each night's
life,"
as Shakespeare didn't say.

Not true that Charon poles
back an empty boat.
We all come back
each morning as the
east brightens.

Leaving behind us unremembered
the black weight that
sank us under, sodden,
leaden.

And we brighten, too, on
those mornings when whatever
faces east glows deep yellow,
tries to take on the luster of
gold.

Sun's powers are evident
elsewhere:
suffusing hymns to Ra;
inspiring that morning-person, Wordsworth,
and Whitman's warbling;
personifying Emily's "happy thing;"
provoking Hemingway's inevitability;
drawing sweet sad old Eliot to his window,
to see, even through the murk,
life beginning again, and
dazzling him in the park, even as he dourly
contemplates the mechanisms of
this life's end,
and on a San Francisco waterfront,
sceptering and crowning
with a sunflower
those twin dharma bums,
Kerouac and Ginsberg.

For me, enough to have
re-entered this place, to
turn my face
to light and warmth.
Ah, Sun!