In fleck-swirl torrent of sun the muscles slack,
Strict tendons relent, this sky compels
With batter of brightness our relinquished limbs.
The charged air swells in diapason, gathers
To roaring of shine. Awash with this riptide —
The long rollers of light stampeding landward
Topple here to puddled dazzlement —
We gasp and grasp at undertow of shining.
Body’s frontiers are breached: the maginot hair
And nervous skin, all our palpitant sentries,
Are stormed by light, light chimes in the cavern lungs,
Rings in the gut, clangs in the cymbal sky.
This violence of light, this fierce in-shining
Takes and shakes us like the fact of love.
The act of. The fact of
Tenderness. Only be careful. Only
Beware the sun.
Avert the pry of knowledgeable fingers.
Raucous with bullyboy fun
The lounging loudmouth sun
Declaims the soft uncertainty,
Blats the terror of wish.
Nowhere is safe: not in the guarded rib cage,
Not in the fractured green-glass depths,
Nor remote in the run
Of fugitive shadow under the crouch of the hill.
Be careful.
Avoid the flaunt of brightness,
The Hey the jocular nudge, the broad flat thumb.
Let her not —
Not walk i’ the sun.
But when we finished the harvest, faces bare
To the candid sky, arms brown and our hair
Ribboned with light, then we brought laughing in
The big last sheaf we call the barley queen,
With brawling horseplay came and hung it here
In the raftered barn to light the spring next year.
— Now in these frozen fields the sun, unmanned,
Persuades no root to grope. The iron land
Deadlocks generation, iron air
Harrows the breath. — But see, shining there,
Our summer straw queen! Though to stoic touch
The plowshare steel be cold as death, yet such
Largess of light lives in this yellow sheaf
As proves the resurrection of the leaf,
Attests the bud, confirms the sober rain.
Next year is quick in last year’s hung-up grain.