Reading Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS While Listening to Tori Amos’ Cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” During the Total Solar Eclipse

Anthony Frame

- for Chris Cornell

I understand, sun: every now and then, I want to disappear, too.

I’m determined to hear the birds, the soft bellows of their throats
anchoring this moment. Lost and long, I steal this day with my wife,

holding hands as we stumble along the unfinished path through

the garden. We’re told not to look directly so we look at each other
or we close our eyes and listen, sunrays washing our arms.

There’s a part of me that wants to blast “Black Hole Sun”

on the record player but she says, “Be here with me.” But I’m not,
I’m thirteen, singing in the shower, thinking about supernovas.

The moon is on the move, shadows starting to startle the birds.

As the garden starts to silence, I think, Is this what it’s like to hear
a god? I want to scream like a star exploding, but instead I sit

and hold my wife’s hand and wait. Perhaps, we need a new cosmology,

a new language, a new sequence of mysteries. As a child, I wanted
to disappear, to separate into droplets of air, rinsed clean and clear.

Sometimes, I’ve wanted to shatter so bright my light would reach

the edges of the galaxy. The sun seems to dissolve behind the moon
and the silence covers us but it lasts just under two minutes and then,

like a birth, the birds start singing again. Every now and then,

I’ve wanted my voice to rise so high it might achieve escape velocity.
I start to hum, knowing these sounds I hope to harvest can’t go on forever,

some of the waves, faced off against friction, will dissipate. But some

will shift, boiling beneath the atmosphere, turning themselves around
until they turn into heat. My wife puts her hand on my chest to still me.

The sun is a squall of fire singing itself raw within a vacuum, but the moon

holds its voice beneath its surface. I lean against my wife, wordless,
against her shoulder, against her eyes, the shadows withdrawing

as she turns me around, like a refrain, to see the second dawn.