Monday, April 20, 2015

light

I’d like to speak about light:
desert pearl light,
slanted pastel light,
smoked glass light.

(Please think about these things:
about the fall of light through glass,
about the press of sun through walls,
about adobe steaming in hot sun,
and the silence of desert-above-pine trees in Taos summer).

Coming around the curve,
the lit scene behind us broke jagged into view--
(underwater backdrop, milk haze, watercolor map)--
an Eocene landscape dropped suddenly away from our car.

You froze this panorama picture for me dear,
living stage, wet and moving-in-haze;
you pin-pointed and stuck
the exact moment of landscape coinciding with consciousness in me.

I could hardly turn away from my new bones of painted earth,
edges that abraded like river-banks, worried and slow,
ever-changing overlap of thin skin boundaries.

As a child, I could recite all faerie cosmos happenings in white waterfalls,
could trace smoke constellations onto dark green pine-scrim,
could wait quietly sitting on logs,
sit quietly in wood fire ash and burnt coffee smoke.

Thin film of mountain dust and dirt ash,
I felt tarnished, worked like a copper coin,
burnished under dust,
gold-blessed.

4/22/2010 elg

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