Sunset, Santa Monica

When it happens, it happens fast.

All day the sun is slow and dignified,

Making a stately circuit in the sky,

Then all at once it drops; hits the horizon;

Spreads out like melting mercury; is gone.

The ceremony is unceremonious,

The climax anticlimactic;

The vanishing is vanishingly brief.

And that’s the way to go.

Don’t linger in your leaving;

Learn from the sun, which blazes like a god,

Fires the firmament, and slips away,

More like a guilty thief than anything,

Letting the living supply the ceremony –

Which we, atremble in the rising dark,

Are more than grateful to fearfully do.