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[with 3 poems by Melinda Thomsen]
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11. Colorado Springs
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In a breath, the sun emerges unfurled
behind the hangar, and the sky turns gold.
It burns like an ore, as nearby grasses roll
in a breeze, and rows of sunflowers twirl
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and flex. The Queen Anne’s lace slowly maps
the sun’s route west. A magpie somewhere
near the playing field squawks. Dawn appears
in shades of granite wearing a mica cap.
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Let me put on the sky’s sapphire chains
and earth’s necklace of headlights from the cars
winding to Denver in their jeweled train.
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When headlamps dim, sunshine shoots like stars
off the cargo bays of arriving planes,
and daybreak shows its wealth by reaching far.
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Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
[this poem is one segment of the poet’s sonnet redoublé]
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The sentinel sugar maple stationed above us on the roadway is first. Each day we park at the track and look up to its expansive globe outstretched in meditation. Preceding all other trees, it affirms change. In the swelling conflict of its upper limbus butterscotch and sulfur, sweet and harsh become the beginning of leaving behind the green of summer. Green we might have convinced ourselves to be eternal and foundational. But all things flow. You can never stand twice beneath the same tree.
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Last night a brief gusty squall; this morning the lone sugar maple has relinquished all but a few scattered flags and tatters. As we enter the woods, however, all the other trees in this progressive congregation are industrious in their competition. Who can display the brightest color? Who the most varied, the most novel? The southern slant of sun penetrates as if through stained glass; streaming light proclaims its gospel of chlorophyll, abscission, anthocyanins, carotenoids. Linda and I drop our worries along the trail like a trail of breadcrumbs – we can at least hope that the birds and chipmunks will devour them all in the hour before we return this way.
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And now we’ve reached the last straight segment before the walking trail offers to climb the ridge and lead back down to the river. We can see the turning where it beckons. Before we reach it we will cross the high bridge over Crooked Creek and look down to see if our fat water snake is sunning herself among the south-facing rocks as usual. Just beyond the bridge we will enter the final high vaulted cathedral. Overleaning trunks and branches, pointed arches familiar in the minds of trees long before Sumeria or Samarra, clad with brass and jade, they invite us now to share this space in reverence.
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This cathedral of flux. The never-changing God this world worships is the God of Changes. The crimson Michaux lilies that celebrated here in August today merely nod a few dry, creased, tri-partite pods, but what do they hold? A celebration of seeds. And beneath the springy duff the roots gone dormant have not forgotten their desire to rise again next April.
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Linda and I stand here for a moment, in the moment. The memory of red blossoms is not what we worship. The anticipation of future blooming is not what we worship. Right here right now is the only real thing – the only real thing is all things that have come before and all that may yet become. We hold a single thought, we hold all thought. For one brief moment approaching joy we are engulfed, we merge with the flux.
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Panta rhei. All things flow.
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Dropping Sunrises in a Jar
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When daybreak edged the earth,
++++ I would roll over – unlike the birds.
It was as if we lived in separate jars.
++++ Wrens whistle and chirp about flames
blooming into a ball at sunrise
++++ then hush with the sun’s full burning.
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I used to sleep through the daily burning
++++ for I didn’t care much how the earth
rotated itself into another sunrise.
++++ But years later, I wondered why birds
got so excited about a horizon in flames.
++++ So much time, I’ve spent within a jar.
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The birds, too, live in a sort of jar,
++++ but they focus outward and seem to burn
with a gratitude that fans their inner flame.
++++ See pelicans fly about the earth?
They dip and lift until the idea of bird
++++ becomes a winged embrace at sunrise.
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When I traveled, I watched every sunrise
++++ to see night leave its door to morning ajar,
and in its wake, I heard the calls from birds.
++++ Each place began with its horizon burning,
though, and I worry our Goldilocks earth
++++ is ending. We choose to go in flames,
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or up in smoke like a moth drawn to flame
++++ when just right gets too hot, but each sunrise
still unleashes warbling tenors upon the earth.
++++ For we don’t see birds flying into bell jars
or coal mines, do we? While forests burn
++++ in the west, in the east, squirrels and birds
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gear up for hurricanes. Notice how birds
++++ of a feather fly from floods and flames?
Instead, I wake to the sky’s daily burning
++++ in these – my sunset – years to collect sunrises.
One by one, I drop then in a jar
++++ like candies gathered from my forgiving earth.
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But this burning keeps flushing out the birds,
++++ who welcome the earth as if an old flame
and add their sunrise songs to its tip jar.
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Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
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Melinda Thomsen lets no sunrise escape her. While the eye notices light returning to the world and the ear may welcome the first emphatic burst of wrensong, the soul delves deeper to discover that the light has never left. Some place where I can untangle myself through flashes of beauty – this is Melinda’s journey and her destination. And as we travel with her across the world and through the universe of Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, this might be the promise we hope to fulfill – One day you’ll shape yourself into the bird your soul holds.
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These poems are woven with recurring images of sunrise and sky, birdsong and sunflowers, but in addition to these enticements Melinda’s use of formality has ensnared me. I am a sucker for a good sestina; this collection’s title poem is a great one. I had pretty much assumed it’s impossible to actually write a Heroic Crown of Sonnets (sonnet redoublé) but here Melinda has mastered it. In just 31 pages, this sequence elevates us and carries us into new worlds.
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Purchase Dropping Sunrises in a Jar at Finishing Line Press.
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The Zoetrope Sunrise of the Taihang Mountains
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Waking in a sleeper car, bunked
with three strangers, I raise the shade
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to watch the sunrise, a pale peach glow,
among the snoring. Cornfields stretch
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beneath gauzy clouds as our train enters
a tunnel and metal sounds reflect
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off its stone interior. As we exit,
the ochre sky lightens, then another
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tunnel and again a waterfall of noise.
Now, the sun glows behind mountain
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peaks, and mist rests in the Taihang
valley of lush shrubbery when a tunnel
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eclipses that view. The train
travels through tunnel after tunnel,
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but between glimpses, the sun rises
and we emerge into a village
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with streams edging the foothills
framed with cornfields and box houses.
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A man feeds his donkey.
The child in our cabin coughs.
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For the Chinese, the road over
Taihang means the frustrations of life.
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Where the sun rises through slits,
this zoetrope carries me home,
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or some place where I can untangle
myself through flashes of beauty.
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I had to get out through stillness;
until bit by bit, the womb opened.
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Melinda Thomsen
from Dropping Sunrises in a Jar, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown KY; © 2024
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[zoetrope: An optical toy, in which figures made to revolve on the inside of a cylinder, and viewed through slits in its circumference, appear like a single figure passing through a series of natural motions as if animated or mechanically moved. – – – bg]
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Three aphorisms attributed to Heraclitus (Greek, ca. 500 BC) declare change and conflict as the fundamental characteristics of reality:
On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.
We both step and do not step into the same river, we both are and are not.
It is not possible to step into the same river twice.
The central tenets of Heraclitus’s philosophy are the unity of opposites and the centrality of flux (change) as encapsulated in the phrase Panta rhei, all things flow.
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