I want to spend the upcoming solar eclipse dancing between science and poetry. I want to careen between explanation and awe. I want to cha cha cha around and among the logisticians and retailers and high-strung bureaucrats and then sashay away.

I want to find myself spiraling among exponential excitement and cellular fear of primal abandonment and humbling recognition of my place in the vast cosmos, only to find myself irrevocably claimed as kin by other earth-bound creatures. 

I want to be just this side of mad, barely able to contain the impulse to tear off my special-order, specialized glasses, as if I just might give my whole self over, a sacrifice to the sun god who has abandoned us and only my offering can do the needful.

In the midday darkness, I want to lose all sense of proportion. For the briefest moment, yet long enough for me to notice, I want to forget that the sun is returning; to feel the terror that my barely-sapien ancestors felt; the fright that caused Emperor Louis of Bavaria, son of Charlemagne, in 840 of the Common Era, to die upon witnessing the very same thing.

Not dying, myself, of course; not dying, not me, not now, not yet.

I want to howl at the black disk moon and hear my fellow humans letting loose similarly, our cries a paean to visceral cosmology. 

I want to know kinship beyond blood, 

beyond species, 

beyond planet.

I want to  l   o  n  g  for the return of celestial light, to know such yearning as core to my existence, leaving its stellar and lunar and solar marks on my psyche for the rest of my mortal days.

I want to discover and delve into my own enormity, the one that coalesces and congeals and cogitates with our collective, retrospective, future-fecund enormity.

I want to weep and wail without hesitation, distinguished from those with lives more like a personal scant desert, not able to produce holy tears to water the sacred ground beneath.

I want, for the briefest of moments, the longest of times, to stop struggling the struggle; and come to know my place here, humble not humiliated, little not belittled:

 alive 

alive

alive