TEKAPO LUPINS



Into an angel’s azure eye staring blankly
up at the sky in a fortress of clasped hands
glaciers of cloud calve off out of the valley.

A long slow drift of pastel-dappled light
dances like a nor’west ripple through a crowd
of faces, facets, cadences in mauve and white,

pink, blue and yellow, crazed by reflections.
The show of floral chutzpa thaws, unmakes
itself into atoms of Heraclitian abstraction

quantum uncertainty,
supremely nude, despite the sharp, defining
clarity of it all, hyaline, amaranthine.

Pink and its cousin purple determine
which cloud-scudded Wedgewood is lake’s
mirror, preventing
   
us floating into space,
yielding to the signal’s cool and subtle flux

the empty stain of the field
fading into the blue din

of the air.

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