Almost Sunrise

 

We waited for hours in copper caves

what menace was compelled to unleash this

cloud of unknowing melting

into unexpected brightness at the margin?

  Grape trio

                  ripening softly

              into the eyes where light

        develops into a cumulus of panthers

          gone purple

                             gone soft & blur-like, like summer

     almost like light trapped in amber

or   planets that detach from their gravity

fields, or clover

                        suddenly on fire

 fleeting as the float of clouds

  foam on a dog’s mouth

a Syrian summer dust storm

            serious as ore

 silver   before it is polished.

 

II

 

An insinuation of peach

warms too late for layers of silver

nothing cold as glacier blue but

almost a feeling of rapture,  

  wax   is a hillside of barren ground

 but shimmering

                           like a Schuman melody

             turning Turner contemporary as milk

        or pearls that have no light of their own

         impasto.

                     A sudden impact.   You turn the corner

      & become alive to the beauty of change

    mutability is like that,

Take

        my latent impulses, turn them

  all into shape, the vigor of spontaneity

   given the heat of an oil stick

      to preserve.

                         That’s what wax is for

          it waxes and wanes   ebbs and

               flows into eternal change.

 

III

 

   She was not sure whether it was

sunrise or light crashing through winter.

    The valleys are black or darker

        like when Leonardo dipped his brush into paint &

turned it around in the mind

 lapus lazuli perfect in its imperfections.

I waited for the distant emerald

flash, but a quiter burst than August’s sun

 copper hills of Wyoming    thunderstorms

            dragonflies erased the azure dream’s distance. Now

 revealed as an alphabet of wax

   letters that fell to the floor of the mailbox

lost

          in a memory of fire

                 or the sheen of an estuary

         in early December cold in the desert

      snakes

            are only one hallucination that reconnect us

                                                              to the source.

     

 

 

Exquisite Corpse

John Olson

Roberta Olson

& Paul Nelson

5:25PM – 9.13.05