Making Your Own Eclipse

Making Your Own Eclipse

Making Your Own Eclipse

The word comes from a Greek word
for ‘abandonment’: we catch an untraceable
fire already kindled in another.

When night falls suddenly
for such a short period
in the clearest skies of the day

as a second darkening,
they could not have known
that what they were seeing was the Moon

acting as a screen.
For blue does not mean
its sensation in us, but the power

in it, the behaviour of the aligning
light in the pleasure-journey
of the obedient morning.

Across Ireland the blueness will drop
to temperatures of dusk,
a gentle east wind

will blow birds silent,
and stars along the Path
of Totality will decorate

the late forenoon.
Bleating flocks and fearful herds
will unexpectedly return to their stables

and patterns of light and dark
will tremble over the ground.
We will keep looking

at the fleecy space,
you curled up with your head
on my knee, saying, We

have been cheated, the twenty-
four seconds are passing and it
is much worse than we expected.

Then there will be the subtle
tension as the Moon begins
to creep into your face,

the cool band of air
in her shadow racing
about as close as it can,

to plunge into the gold spot
where the magnified Sun
will sail under the same perfect pearl.

Flowers will close their petals
while wildly thrashing magnetic fields
sprout from your surface,

so anyone standing near trees
will see thousands of suns
engulfing hundreds of worlds.

This will not happen again
until the year 2090,
but you must turn your gaze

as soon as the Moon starts to move
and stand with your back
to the black candle of the Sun

loosing flaming arrows,
like a plastic Christ that hovers
above a wishing well,

thinking, now it is over,
it was like recovery from a fever
which lasted about as long as is possible,

kneeling and raised as if washed
by the one planet where life is believed
to exist – hold your arms out towards it.