(aubade)

Strokes of pink narrow clouds
daub faint lattices across the brightening horizon sky.
Pre-dawn light composes incipient daedal reflections
of trees on the pond surface.
Despite a thin morning haze, deep indigoid shadows
shimmer on the glazed veneer,
as from unclouded Alasnam’s mirror.

A musty wisp of dank fallen leaves
crisply accents this fleeting blue time
in a blushing daybreak.

Too long detained unseen, the sun glides mutely upward,
flashing an arched diadem of brilliance
just above the tree line.
The lemony splendor, chasing away lingering mists,
neatly washes off darker shades from the liquid facade.

The water is calm and almost pristine -
but, just as there are lees to every wine,
a sparse film of dust and pollen
floats beneath overhanging bushes
where a clogged spider web sags from a drooping array
of cocooned insects.
A dark eddy sinks into the still water surface
capturing a twig in a binding swirl.

At apexes of etched intersecting angles,
water bugs dimple the tensioned surface.
Nearby, the plop of a fish briefly disrupts the stillness;
then, tiny frothed ripples, like lengths of pearly cotton-yarn,
lap silently into collapsing bubbles
that vanish on the muddy bank.

As I pause in the scene with fern seed of Memory’s eye,
it is a good time to reflect on these silent echoes
from my cap and feather days;
Nonetheless, I am an intruder here . . .

Suddenly! In the confluence of the newly-revealed sun
and a gust of ponent breeze,
like an infinitude of fairy sparks,
or embers that wax and wane in puffs of air,
flickering gems of reflected sunlight
sprinkle the water surface -

Baptizing the infancy of a new day.


❀

NOTES:

Alasnam’s mirror* - If one looks into Alasnam’s mirror and the reflection is clear, then the gazer’s loved one is virtuous; if the reflection is cloudy, however, . . . .

cap and feather days - Childhood.
daedal - Complex or intricate, like the wings of Daedalus.
fairy sparks - Phosphorescence from decaying
substances.
fern seed - An invisible presence.
lees to every wine - “There are lees to every wine:” the
best things have defects (French proverb: Il y a de la lie
dans tout).
ponent wind - Westerly wind ( an easterly wind is a
levant wind ).

* These phrases may be found in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Centenary Edition, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1970.