Colors of the Sun

Listen while you read:  Tom Rush gives Jackson Browne a boost.

Colors of the sun
Flashing on the water top
Echo on the land

Digging for a coin
Many other tiny worlds
Slipping from my hand

Awake to understand you are not dreaming
It is not seeming to be this way

Dying men draw numbers in the air
Dream to conquer little bits of time
Scuffle with the crowd to get their share
But fall behind their little bits of time

Voices in the air
Sympathetic harmony
Coming from the trees

Hanging at my door
Many shiny surfaces
Clinking in the breeze

Oh, leave me where I am, I am not losing
If I am choosing not to plan my life

Disillusioned saviors search the sky
Wanting just to show someone the way
Asking all the people passing by
Doesn't anybody want to pray?

Oh, say goodbye to Joseph and Maria
I think they see another sky
From my fallen window I still see them
I'll never free them from the sky

~  Jackson Browne

So do you remember when you were in elementary or middle school (or maybe even high school) and your teacher taught you how to write a haiku? You know, 5 - 7 - 5 ? All you had to do was count syllables and you had yourself a poem! Seventeen syllables . . . anyone can suffer through that, right?

The truth is this: Haiku is a legitimate form of Japanese poetry, and it's much more complicated than what your fifth grade teacher would have led you to believe. So wiki it yourself and learn as much as you want.

Meanwhile, there are four verses in Jackson Browne's song that qualify as haiku. (Can you identify them?) I discovered this back in the 70s, when I first learned of Jackson Browne. "Colors of the Sun" appears on his second album, 1973's For Everyman. But I first heard the song on the eponymous Tom Rush album from 1970, and it still grabs me, so that is the version in the link above.

My guess is that Jackson was still a teenager when he wrote this, and who knows? Maybe he started it as an English homework assignment to write some haiku! Granted, it is not his best work, but we can forgive his youth for that and agree that he certainly got better over the years.

So on the flight home, I was searching my brain for a song to punctuate yesterday's total eclipse experience. Minus the wind chimes and Joseph and Maria, I think this song captures the dreamlike quality of the experience. If, indeed, it could possibly be captured. This is what I remember:

Totality brought a cool and a stillness to the land. We'd been sweating in the mid-day Georgia sun, and suddenly, the earth air-conditioned itself and pushed us into a stupor of other-worldliness. Despite the increasingly frantic screams of the locusts, we observed our surroundings in a slow-motion quiet that felt like a dream. Within seconds, that quiet was disturbed by the persistent, soulful howls of coyotes. A lone bat sped across the dimmed twilight sky before us. Thinking it was time, gnats formed circular spotted clouds above the landscape. And we humans, all six of us, screamed in fear or jubilation or both.

Despite the accuracy of technological timepieces of the day, Sperling's 8-second Law claims that any total eclipse lasts only eight seconds. It seems to affirm that, no matter the actual length of time, our memories will only allow the experience to last for eight seconds. And I have to say that I think that is true. I am still having a hard time processing the experience, but I know that it is already a very brief moment in my memory. How can I possibly name it? Explain it? Validate it?

I can't. No sooner had the diamond ring of the corona emerged than we seemed to return to our original forms, small human inhabitants in a universe so large and random that planets could crash into one another without our even knowing. We talked, we laughed, we put our eclipse glasses back on for glimpses of that which had moments earlier amazed us. The eclipse was happening now in reverse, but we were so full of ourselves, we barely paid attention. The music came back on, and we sang and danced to "Age of Aquarius." We were joyful, but we were also human again. Here, have a beer. Never mind that celestial orbs just danced over our heads in a frightening display of chance. We're still here, aren't we?

While moon conquers sun
Coyotes try to warn us
Deaf, we dance alone

Photo credit: Martti Cade