Leaf Diamonds
The morning after never fails
To put last night’s darkness at a loss—
Lichen hiding on the trails,
Mushrooms camouflaged as moss,
Rotting logs with flanks like whales
And sultry nodes for eyes,
All revealed for what they are
Underneath the mountain skies,
Unlike postcard suns that mar
The shifting clouds with static lies,
Trying hard to placate leaves
With imitations of the air,
Holding science up our sleeves
Like nature’s glitzy underwear,
A naked beauty’s coy sashay
Where, underneath the latest fashion
The empty planet falls away,
Where our self-destructive passion
Hides behind the skirt’s cliché,
So that panoramas are like clothes,
A trifle overblown but gracing
Meadows with such youth
As forms the day, like the windy drone
Of fire in the flues,
Whose bricks and screens
Together warm us, sheathe
Us in the glimmers of the morning
And include us in its preening,
Jeweled and dewed,
Solar clockwork in the nude.
January 20th, 2020
Kailua
February 5th, 2022
Kaiholu
Explanation
This is a poem which I find confusing enough to want to explain to myself.
It says that dew on a leaf is both bad and good. It’s simply clothes to hide the emptiness of the world. But it’s also the remains of the clockwork that clicks the world from night to day. It’s the residue of an immense natural clock that seems to be shallow but in fact is the sign of a vast, complicit system.
The poem progresses from the shallowness of clothes to the depth of nature’s clothes.
Diamonds on a leaf are morning dew. They outshine the night, symbols of the day’s triumph, which includes the moss, lichens, and logs in our woods in Colorado. Day makes their identities clear.
Postcards, on the other hand, create a more artificial beauty, their skies less convincing. They hide the facts of the day like a magic trick with false versions of it, shadows, clothes, hiding the Platonic cave’s wall.
Our brilliant imitations of day in photographs, or the false icons of fashion, seemingly dazzle meaningless reality and science with their trendiness, as we destroy the earth by caring more about dresses than oceans.
If fish-eye photos of nature are surfaces, and if clothes are a façade, yet they transition to grace.
They grace the world with ideas of youth, the love of life which infuses our days with meaning, as a fireplace warms us, a fireplace being the clothes of a fire.
Photos may be shallow, but they nevertheless protect us, clothe us in nature, so that we are glorified along with the morning’s light.
Like the dew, we are jeweled, the way a watch has a jeweled escarpment, the way a woman wears a necklace, so that these natural jewels, water drops on a leaf, are, like the decorations of fashion, small parts of the sun’s giant mechanism, seen without any clothes to get in the way. They are diamonds, metaphors for the precious remnants of the solar gears. While they might seem trivial, they are in fact proof of the hidden meaning of the world.
Condensation is the mechanics of the air, the underwear, the inner essence of the sky brought down to earth. Its water is like clothes that warm and guard us, that mirror us like reflections of the painter in Jan van Eyck’s mirror, so that the handiwork of time is suddenly exposed, dew being the residue of the night, the symbol of the solar system’s invisible gears, brought down to the empty surface of a leaf, sun bestowed on our unworthy planet by an invisible hand, the signs of cosmic design left, almost by accident, out to dry on an innocent leaf.