of a sort. Hard to say why. A post in front of the house once held a sign – I don’t know what the sign said, I was not here then, but clearly the post was meant to hold a sign. Words, oh unrighteous words, this is this and not that, as if words capture essence as opposed to suggestion. Wallace Stevens, even though he extends the idea to images, understood how little is left after fullest evisceration – “To-morrow when the sun, For all your images, Comes up as the sun, bull fire, Your images will have left No shadow to themselves”

So should I remove the post or put a sign there, and if a sign, what sign? For some time I dwelt on this. Unrelatedly I’d been looking at old farm equipment and found myself drawn to rotary hoe blades, the more tines the better – to me they had a sun-like sense, a spinning blazing sun-sense, a vague suggestion of the incomprehensible power of the sun. From this coincidence of musings my solution arose.

Rustoleum, of course, irony notwithstanding.

And then a tiny measure of endeavor, to bore a peg hole at the top of the post, to fashion a peg with a bulbous end, to affix the hoe sun to the post with the peg, to set it back in the ground.

Of course dust is the final outcome, but along the way, for a brief and shining set of moments, we make our gardens and pray that the sun grace them.