The New Life

About

At noon, as summer approaches, you feel
the sun slipping through the rich
crown and lighting it up, making it
transparent and bright forever.

Kids in white T-shirts run towards the locker room
to sink their heads under cold water, so that nothing remains
of the mind darkened by the happiness of the trap.
You’re in their gaze, forgotten by everyone.

So deeply lowered and carried
that you won’t remember where you ended up
when you have returned to the solar meditation temple.
You fell asleep on the bench and woke up to a concert
in the garden, frozen in a frozen crowd.

Transfer the light from the hatch onto the children, even if
the effort wears out your heart, and let them win,
even if you won’t be welcomed in their flushed exhilaration.
Whatever kept you still so far
(believing that a secret law shortens people by
2 mm every year; the same law, which you don’t like
but which has shielded you in moments of intensity,
gives you more than it takes away at the noon
replaced by the polaroid catch) places microphones
and cameras in the simplest movement of the light front.
For a few hundred bytes somebody will love you 200 years from now.

Now you can stand up and look for your girlfriend in the hatch park.
She’s lying in the grass, she’s the brutal, abstruse warmth in the passage to summer.