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.