April is National Poetry Month, and every year Knopf sends me a poem a day during April. (Though it's a bit late, they'll send you one too, if you send a blank email to: sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. They'll keep you on the list for next year, too.)
I received the most wonderful poem yesterday, by Dan Chiasson, from his book Natural History:
The Sun
There is one mind in all of us, one soul,
who parches the soil in some nations
but in others hides perpetually behind a veil;
he spills light everywhere, here he spilled
some on my tie, but it dried before dinner ended.
He is in charge of darkness also, also
in charge of crime, in charge of the imagination.
People fucking flick him off and on,
off and on, with their eyelids as they ascertain
with their eyes their love's sincerity.
He makes the stars disappear, but he makes
small stars everywhere, on the hoods of cars,
in the compound eyes of skyscrapers or in the eyes
of sighing lovers bored with one another.
Onto the surface of the world he stamps
all plants and animals. They are not gods
but he made us worshippers of every
bramble toad, black chive, we find.
In Idaho there is a desert cricket that makes
a clocklike tick-tick when he flies, but he
is not a god. The only god is the sun,
our mind—master of all crickets and clocks.
