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A Place in the Sun
© 2014
This morning when I saw our dog
curled up in a square of sunlight
on the living room floor, I thought
briefly of Montgomery Clift,
his gloomy quest in the film
that co-opted the phrase.
But quickly that image faded
and I skipped back to the time
before I had seen a desert
and dreamt during arithmetic
of a sand expanse stretching north
up the sunlit slope of my desk
until it fell off into the Grand Canyon,
reminded then that all I needed to do
was step out the creaky double door
of our one-room schoolhouse
to track down my own place in the sun
that moved with the seasons
up and down hills, through oak groves
and fields, or only a few steps
beyond our backyard chicken coop,
under a cluster of sumac, where
magically in the dead of winter
I could stretch out on a cushion of
green and reach for a handful
of snow. Or wait for an afternoon
in early spring to wander down
to the brook at the base of the slope
to watch bright civilizations of
salamanders go about their lizardly business
in patches of watery brilliance
just beyond the shadow of the overhang
that lengthened as I lay there
until the sun was gone, and they with it.
www.TheBlueGuitarMagazine.org Fall 2014
10