My City Is Also a City

The sun does rise over the hills

in Appalachia, over the lesser cities,

over the fields of corn stopped

abortively in their transit away

from the earth.

The sun seems to rise everywhere

and, hark, say the meteorologists—

apocalyptically coiffed, forsaken

spiritualists—hark, here comes the dry line!

Here comes your best entry

into drought!

The sun rises like a great infected eye,

like a fist, like a woman cringing

from a fist. The sun rises

like a bowl of water

we empty into the sink, like the singing

bugs we swat away

in the humid night.

Lo, it rises—even in the winter—

but emaciated like a balletic

leg to the barre, like

an anemic spleen struggling

with the body’s gastronomy.

It has to pump and thrust

itself above the tree line,

but it rises.

So insistent is the sun,

we learn to turn our faces from it,

which makes it wretched.

So insistently it wrenches the last

gray feelers

from the sky,

turns them the yellow

of your skin,

you, who struggle beneath it,

your shadow impressed upon

the small, dark rock

from which you scrutinize its working,

you, a pillar, whose meager shade

circumscribes the passage

of the other, that which

turns its face always toward the dark face

of this: our small, dark rock.