Solstice
Today the world moves from winter’s cold ordeals
And the doubtful promises of a halting spring
To the lavish clocks of summer, to the wheels
And ratchets of planetary spokes that sing
Of beach and sun, of the arbor’s resurrection,
The success of grass and triumph of the trees,
The luxuriance of countryside and gardens
Where fountains sparkle in the rampant breeze,
And not just fountains, but entire solar systems
Turn today from dissonant, uncertain gears
To the music of the spheres, as universes blossom
All at once, as matter to itself adheres
And our limbs connect to others at the end of space,
Through a secret field which joins us all
Like clockwork, matching lovers face to face
Beyond our courtyard’s beautiful but useless wall:
And so the trellis of our fractured lives unites
All things, the living and the dead, no matter where,
As the fulcrum of the year today puts to rights
The watchful symmetries which are always there.
Explanation
When our friends Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa designed the Portals, standing stones that are doors to our sculpture park, to the world of the high plateaus where the light is always ionized and filtered through mist or storm light, as if we’ve wandered into a land of strange shapes that echo the giant spikes which jut out of the Beartooth mountains there like scales on a dinosaur’s back, when Antón and Débora designed the Portals, they brought Antón’s father along with them.
Antón Senior, the great Catalan composer, had lost the love of his life, his wife Aurea, just the week before. And yet he brought, along with his entire family, his songs and his grief to share with us that week.
It was our 36th wedding anniversary, it was the summer solstice, and it was the raising of the steles, an almost pagan celebration of resurrection. The poem, “Solstice,” for me continued into another universe, a Lost World, through the Portals into our own Cretaceous garden, bringing with it all of our lives, the life of Aurea, and the music that Antón Senior wrote to convince her to marry him.
Antón and Débora made it into a film with that music, celebrating the raising of the spires, our lives entwined in landscape, music, words, rites of summer, and in the stars that lit the portals at night.
Stonehenge was a sundial for the Zodiac, a stardial. The Portals in their own way are windows into the mountains.
If the souls of the people we care about still exist as matter in the air, they are transmuted back to us on certain days in certain light and with certain words. May this poem guide them into our own mountains.
June 21st, 2016
Fishtail, Montana