The Sun, Reversed

When your summer world expires—
if you die
go blind
or mad—

your memory of the neighbor's shed
the sneaky lash of your grandfather's tongue
the particular trash in the gully moating
the Lutheran church
as the AA meeting
lets out

will seep with profound anticlimax
from your earholes
and nostrils

like mercury
or whatever it is
in a battery
that corrodes on gravel
when run over or
burst.

Meanwhile the sun—
with sad infinity
heavenlike indifference—
will still radiate
no matter
all the things it always has:

vague beachy childhood headache
light the same color as Jackie's organ sounded
bike trail whiteness
night tryst blackness
and all the living love
you could possibly want

brilliant as ever
without second thought.

It will be the sun
that glimmers dancingly on the liquid
of your memory

pooling there in La Rosa's
parking lot.

Believe it or not
but the sun really does not mind
if the world turns it cool
then frigid
in the shadows
of building's corners.

The sun, reversed, is what makes
the water cold
in the drinking fountain
behind the Dairy Queen.

By now
it is not a tightrope shadow
that twitches shimmery and green in the April grass

but the cord that brings us the cable television
wobblingly aloft.