ECLIPSE SKIT: A PROSE POEM

                                        by Dick Bakken 


Annular Eclipse of the Sun, Monday 6/10/02, Bisbee, Arizona, 
beginning 1:51 pm, greatest 4:48 pm, ending 7:36 pm


But, baby, you called right in the middle of the eclipse. I’d had a routine day until then.
After scribbling all morning, I had chugged my coughing VW out to Safeway, where the
hills aren’t so close and high, to buy some bananas, yogurt, and frozen orange juice—
all on good sales—to make smoothies. I’d run into Ed, the sweet Chinese techie who
had worked at the Bisbee News with me, and his brand new Japanese wife, both of
them young and slender and on motorbikes, out for groceries. I was next to a big bin of
bananas telling them just how I blend together a smoothie and about the eclipse going
on outdoors. When I rolled my cart out of Safeway, there they were, Ed holding up a
cardboard soda flat with a pinhole punched in the middle with a pocket-pen point. His
new wife was aiming their high-tech digital camera at the big white pillar close to
Safeway’s entrance, where the eclipse was being projected onto the stucco by Ed’s
box. A clerk rushed up blurting that my cart had rolled away down the slope and steps
to crash and explode all my sodas, which he helped me pick up, plus ten boggled
yogurts, before dashing in to get me a new six-pack of diet cola gratis. Shoppers had
begun to gather at the eclipse projection site and so it all became a spontaneous-
performance-happening. My pal John was suddenly there with his own digital camera,
then John’s old neighbor Walter from out toward your mom’s Double Adobe property,
then skinny Anya with the tiny titties, and more and more, everyone so cheery and
elated. John and I walked over beyond Burger King so he could get some shots of me
under the leafy trees with sunlight through the shadows cascading eclipse crescents all
over my white shirt. Back at the eclipse skit in front of Safeway even more people had
gathered. I leaned up against the pillar in police-frisk mode and both John and Ed shot
me in the back with crescent sun projections. And Brian, my techie buddy, showed up
on his way home from work in Sierra Vista, whom I then introduced to John, who had
moved to Double Adobe from Seattle with his girlfriend Stephanie a couple years before
they broke up and John moved into that little shack next door to me. I’d given Stephanie
a phone number for Brian awhile back when she was enduring huge computer
frustration. Now Brian had been back the day before to Stephanie’s, who lives near
Safeway because she has developed MS and has to be in closer to town and so got
into the nearby assisted living facility, while John moved back out to the Double Adobe
property with Stephanie's dog Snoot, next to old Walter in his Stetson and suspenders.
So Brian called Stephanie on the payphone next to my exploded sodas and took off to
get her modem working, with me shouting after him that John and I would be at Tacho’s
and to stop there on his way home and I’d buy him dinner. But John and I decided there
in happy patio twilight before our soon empty plates in front of Tacho’s that Brian was
not showing. So we met back at the Safeway plaza video store to pick out a movie and
popcorn and new cold sodas and then met at my house in the dark, where I listened to
your message while John stacked his no-longer-frozen groceries in my fridge and
hurried to the bathroom. I held the phone in my lap while we watched Spy Game
(Robert Redford, Brad Pitt) but you must have been humming in one of the Seattle
laundromats while your bright dress with so many little buttons down the front flew
around and around in a drier, clicking those small pearl moons in perfect sync with the
hum of your presence.