Total eclipse

Yesterday I drove my car out to the fields to watch the solar eclipse. I checked every chart. I read all the data.

* * *

Put on the dark glasses. They were designed by scientists, following the standards. Look toward the sun for a moment. A star. Look away… look again!

The star is hungry and wants to burn your eyes. It shines too much. Its greatness is excessive for mortal gazes.

Now the field turns orange. It’s sunset, but it’s no longer August. You’ve traveled in time to October or November. The sun’s glow does not match the color that dresses the scene.

A little more. In the black screen of the glasses you see a line growing narrower and lower. It shrinks to a point. Glasses off! You can see it with your own eyes!

* * *

The sky is purple and indigo. Dark blue around the beams of light, and between the beams and the black disk, white electric rays crackling. Two stars flicker in the sky. The fields darken.

The solar disk, enormous and black, looks at you. White rays surround it. It is no longer the sun, now it is Atum-Ra! Time has stopped, and it is neither day nor night.

Red, blue, and purple colors swirl around the god.

The glow returns. The divinity becomes a star again. Time resumes.

* * *

When we return home, you and I look at the photographs. We see the photos taken by other people.

“None of them look like what we saw”, you tell me.

There is only a point of light there. Or at most a black sky, a black disk in the center, and a few diffuse rays.

“It wasn’t black, it was purple, blue, and even green", I tell you. And it wasn’t a black disk with rays of the sun around it.

It was a magical portal to another world. It was stopping time. It was night in the afternoon, the glow of the solar god, surrounded by storms and embraced by the wings of Horus.

* * *

I don’t dare create an image of this. I leave it there: in your mind.

I leave it where dawn and dusk live in the mountains.
Where the paths you never stop to walk lie.
The stairways that descend into ruined places.
The walks under the moon’s silver light where your eyes and mine meet.