Sunlight, and The Object in View

photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

by Cole Swensen

Sunlight

is audible when it strikes on a slant, its chant determined by a number of factors, for instance, its rhythm is determined by the time of day, its pitch, by the time of year, and as for tone, it’s the weather—say a cloud bank breaks up too quickly, and there’s the sun, suddenly undone by its own light.

Or sunlight is substance poured out on, is a saint strolling unbound; the sun dissolves everything it rolls across, though it sometimes takes millennia—mountains, etc.—while in other cases, less than a century, says the human, or even less than a day, adds the fly.

There are others who say that sunlight is butter, or at least that it tastes like it, but we so rarely stop to put it in our mouths, though doing so has distinct benefits. For instance, thanks to the poet Mary Ruefle, I’m aware that while our skin has blocks that filter out most of the sun’s vitamin D, our tongues do not, so if you “stick out your tongue at the sun,” as she puts it, and count to ten, you’ll absorb enough vitamin D to last you a week.

The Object in View

is tiny because I’m looking at it through a very bad lens, which is a shame—I keep looking for a better one—but in the meantime, this small thing is not without interest, an interest which, in fact, keeps growing in exact proportion to how clearly I can’t see it.

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