The Solar Eclipse
The Solar Eclipse
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
How grandiose we make the quotidian.
All I did was take an old cardboard box
(Beef Steak, its past contents what fed me for a month),
and cut out a rough square into one side:
a window I covered with aluminum foil
so that after pushing a pin through the metal
light could shine onto a slip of paper
placed at the opposite end of the box.
Like a shield, I held this contraption at arm’s-length
and walked backwards into the grayscale day,
keeping track of the disappearing sun
by staring, not at the eclipse, but at its light
projected as a spec on my tool’s paper-screen –
similar to what Perseus must have done
when dueling Medusa, her life-freezing features
reflected in the aspis that he carried.
Standing in this dark-cooled breeze (a surreal bower
where bluebirds chirped midday as though it were dusk/dawn)
I could not help but notice my instrument
protected me from becoming like Actaeon,
that curious man who looked directly
at Artemis, the chaste moon-goddess, while she bathed –
his eyes burned by the naked radiance they spied,
and as I now stare at two heavenly beings
in my refracted, diluted, sideways fashion
this event reminds of my own mythos:
that those who look upon the Divine’s face will die
and yet we can view him in a sunbeam
and can even approach with meager means,
kitchen-cut cardboard, slim pens, language,
and live.
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
Poet & Chaplain
Nathaniel serves as a chaplain within the Christian Reformed Church. His first collection of poems, An Evensong, is available from Wipf and Stock. Currently, he lives in Muskegon, MI, with his librarian wife, Lydia, meaning life is a perpetual story-time.
Photography by Clay Banks