Eclipse

Childhood and the Sixties made Cleethorpes California -
my boyhood beach vibrated with a sunshine state of mind.
The line that crossed the west coast in my guidebook to the heavens
was on another planet called the Future then.
We thought we would walk on the moon, not on the line.

That narrow path lay waiting through the night-filled years that followed,
an afterimage of the sun still lingered in closed eyes.
Beyond belief, that I should be there after all
to walk a line drawn by another world.

And now it seems to me
that the inviolate light that will attend my end filled my beginning;
that since the world is round,
the sunset is continuous with the dawn around its far lit side
and it is not quite big enough to stop the sun that seeps around its edges.

Maybe life is just a shadow passing over us,
a brief chill interlude
when we can look into the sky and not see God.