Jim Carroll
A Child Growing Up with the Sun
The sun sits back, watches the street
like an informant for the junta.
By now, I understand each motive
in the sky, and its shadows on earth.
I am helpless nonetheless. It's tough
when an immense power cannot be terrorized.
When it is invulnerable to a slip of madness.
I acknowledge its brilliance, as I was left, by choice
to shadows. And in that shelter, I dreamt.
I spent my youth's desires like a peculiar currency.
It was a running joke between myselves,
the one I believed in, and each of the others.
It confessed its innocence to me
through Mayakovsky's poem. Once,
It poisoned my skin in the Rockaways
to get my attention. I took it for granted.
That was a magnificent mistake.
I never learned to trust it. I wore dark
glasses, disguised my skin in hats with wide brims.
It knew too much, its vantage point always
too well chosen. Where did it go at night?
thought the child, and who did it meet and what, exactly,
did it have to report? So they grew, these suspicions,
as one. And I chose, instead, the dark dance of the moon.
In the face of two, I have always sought the lesser majesty.
For John Donne
Stars, in their unchecked lust,
ejaculate still onto the barren moons
their pulsating milk. The solar winds
like Aurora seeds, enter
At the poles of this planet, above and below.
Don't you see
the obscenity of glaciers, waiting like
aged dictators, blinding white,
impatient for their cycle to devour?
Born of this,
we watch night grow,
voyeurs of cloudless nights,
impatient and pathetic
to imitate its pleasure, to uncover
the code of its birth.
John Donne
(1573-1631)
The Sun Rising
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy, pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices.
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late tell me
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them or lie here with me;
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear: All here in one bed lay.
She's all state, and all princes I;
Princes do but play us; compar'd to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy's we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine ages asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here with us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls they sphere.
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