sun

the d trains, NYC, 2004

"sun" is composed of two images, which don't translate well from AVI to MOV format. Therefore, click here to go to Truitt page on UBU.com, where it is stably lodged.


This phoem occurs on the subway, starting (I think) in Brooklyn and ending on Lex at 59th Street near Bloomingdale's. There is in riding the subway always the feeling of what is happening actually in our lives--the iconography of the brooding underground - and the passage of time relative to motion with always at the end of it that hole through which light night and day pours.

Thought, how we inhabit our minds - that in which we dress up in order to navigate that dimension--is akin to the faces of people, each of whom we are.

They rhyme, though they do not recognize each other.

They drift, gather: Release, shrink.

The phrase "when screws were grooved to turn clockwise" is repeated throughout my writings and points toward the invention of the machine screw and nut in the late 16th century--and so the beginning of what was the modern era and the emergence of mechanical clocks. Here I am adding the phrase "in our hearts," whereas it usually ends "in our heads," which Cartesian thought seems most to drill out. I cannot explain why, in this case, I chose the heart insertion except as it may relate to the sexual imagery with which the poem is lanced.

I lifted the last line from Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme."