The first lines of a Tomas Transtromer poem:
The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down
The sun
soaking through the smog! (The rest of the poem is below.)
Yesterday I came across another sun-sky-movement passage, this time in a very early page of Wallace Stegner's novel,
Crossing to Safety. The narrator has just left his wife to sleep longer and stepped out for a walk in the woods surrounding a cottage they have traveled to the night before. It is early morning, "keen air, gray light, gray lake below, gray sky through the hemlocks whose tops reach well above the porch." He walks a bit down a dirt road alongside of a hill:
Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars.
Wonderful, that "drowned."
Each of these two passage is contained in a fine bit of writing wherein the sun exchanges further with the writer (and us). Here below is Transtromer's poem,
Looking Through the Ground and the rest of Stegner's paragraph, on page six of the Modern Library paperback edition of his book. Enjoy!
Looking Through the Ground
The white sun is soaking through the smog.
The light drips, gropes its way down
to my deep-down eyes that are resting
deep under the city looking up
seeing the city from below: streets, foundations--
like aerial photos of a city in war
the wrong way around--a mole photo:
silent squares in somber colors.
The decisions are taken there. No telling
bones of the dead from bones of the living.
The sunlight's volume is turned up,
it floods into flight cabins and peapods.
translated by Robin Fulton
_________________
Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars. Its edges are piled with hills. Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.
