Eclipse I, New York, 9 April 2024
Cyanotype prints (I have tried for weeks to flatten them with books but they haven’t really, they never did let themselves go flat) made with stones and stone pieces and stone shadows, made quickly and with sunlight from those last moments of the eclipse (the sun returning to itself, to us), fingers stinging, knuckles stinging with wind, with that yellowing water meant for rinsing, a mixing bowl from our kitchen cabinet, this bowl I later leave in the dishwasher and then wonder after if I’ve somehow done something dangerous.
Notes on the eclipse as transcribed from my notebook:
April 9, 2024
Eclipse day, morning, sky clear, birdsong, all that growing up new growth, snow mostly melted by now except in those places of shadow. Something like excitement inside my skin, humming through my whole body. There is awe in it and unease, too. I can’t seem to keep my thinking still. There is no keeping my thinking still. (The feeling is of a gathering-up, a nearly-there-crescendoing, a wave collecting itself, all that slow building.)
In just a few hours there will be right here a glimpse of space from space. And that doesn’t quite touch it, does it? Not really. Not the vastness, the immensity. The fact of this cosmic happening and somehow it is also Monday morning. There are the week’s groceries to buy, my son to fetch from school, the plumber to call (the toilet blocked again after he flushed away yesterday evening his plastic hammer, his purple screwdriver).
The kitchen, my sweater on backwards, the floor cold through my socks. My husband wonders aloud if the sun isn’t a little brighter today. I wonder to myself if he isn’t right.
And then it is time to leave.