November 28, 2012

That light between night and dawn is so lovely, I never get tired of seeing it, such a deep vibrant blue, almost too dark to be called blue, maybe indigo, but it seems to me indigo has more green in it than this blue, which seems to lean more toward the purple or red shade.  No matter what you call it, the color is just spectacular, and free, and occurs most clear mornings so its a prolific kind of beauty as well.  There were birds out this morning, but just the regular cardinals and bluejays and woodpeckers and mockingbirds and a couple of vultures flying silently in lazy circles; no big flocks of black birds nor even any doves, so by contrast it was pretty quiet!  Now it's nearly noon and all the clouds have vanished and the sky is mostly blue and blue some more.  It's warming up, now it's mid fifties, will be mid sixties pretty soon, not warm enough for me but better than this morning when it was cold and windy.

I read this poem a few days ago and decided to save it for this week.  I had to look up the panoramic picture of Mars, and found a really neat one.  It's like you are standing on Mars and slowly turning in a circle.  Some of the mountains look hauntingly familiar, kind of like the Organ Mountains but redder.  I love what they can do with video and cameras, and our very vivid imaginations.  It's almost like visiting Mars.  Perhaps they will make a spectacular find, but even if they don't just getting to see another world is enough for me!

Panoramic View

Last week Mars suddenly got a lot closer.
It used to be the place we'd throw out
as impossible, utterly unreachable, so red
and foreign and sere. Not anymore.
And I'm trying to figure out why watching
the panorama makes something in the hot core
of me crumple like a swig-emptied can,
intoxicating though it may be, vibrant
with out-of-this-world color like the whole thing's
a sand painting, a dimensional mandala
some galactic monk took her sweet time pouring
freehand, blowing on it between sips of her tea,
ruffling up the most dramatic of its rumpled crests.
It's bluer than I thought, attained. Like most things
I wish we could take back.

Shanna Compton

I found a really nice site that had a great treatment of the panorama from Curiosity.  So here is the link if you want to see the view the poem is about :  www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/high-res-curiosity-panorama  Actually this site had a bunch of panoramas that were really cool but the Curiosity one was the neatest.  Mars was the unreachable, but now it seems not so far away, and looks a lot more like places here on earth.  I wouldn't wish to take it back though, there are always going to be new things to explore, we don't nearly understand even our little corner of it all that well.  So there is lots of work for us to do and places to go in reality and our imaginations.  The lady monk can pour us a new vision any time, while sipping her tea, and I am sure there will be poets in whatever world to tell us the story.