Halides
The moon shines, full and cold,
And vast white fins of rock loom pale
Behind the frost-clumped weeds
That fold around the cabin on all sides.
On our mountain ridge a veil
Of aspens lets the glossed humps,
The lurching drumlins, bleed
Through, streaked with trails.
Never was a view so clothed in snow,
In boughs blasted white by wind
And ice, polished by the glow
Of an unfailing satellite. Beyond the woods,
The immense streaked mounds clump
Around us, that would howl like
A pack of highway cars, if they could.
Clouds lower, ominous, plotting new
Dumps, bent on covering the stars,
On muffling the stark bone glint
Of the trees, lumbered to prevent,
Too, the crystal lattice that creeps
Farther each year, like yeast,
Live with the blood
Of glistening beasts latent
By day, but who in the dark,
Phosphorescent,
Flood to our gate, park,
And, luminous, wait.
December 27, 2023, 3–5 a.m.
Tippet Alley
Explanation
Metal halides are used in lamps, such as streetlights. I mean them to be anything that glows: bioluminescent plankton, night shining clouds, the naked bark of aspens in the moonlight. The oil lamps of Paris, réverbères, remind me of the nights we spent walking back from cafés along the closed bouquiniste boxes on the Seine. The music of Debussy, Ravel, and Mompou summons up their numinous glow. Gas lamps contain spirits, as the photographs of Atget and Brassaï or our friend Ilse Bing’s Bec de gaz suggest. I think also of the invertebrate wonderland of False Bay on San Juan Island, China Miéville’s underground city of strange ectoplasms waiting for ascendancy.
Unexplained cars drive around the public roads going through our ranch in Colorado in the small hours of the night, looking for salvation, love, drugs, the undefined ends of the soul. Like the distant lights of the valley, there are more of them each year, and eventually they will absorb our solitude, I suspect. Our aspens are small defense against their inevitable geometric progression.