Agate Wilderness

It's fitting to associate this panorama with agate, That stone which has an inner vista half-revealed. In order for your eye to peer into those layered veils, You'll need rapt perception that gauges the gradients, Until seeing becomes a part of the subject matter seen, So this landscape is an agate's inner vista after all. How is it so clear, even through an airplane window? It doesn't need detail, only steps of color intensity; All the contours are set off by grades of shading, So essential details of ridgelines come through, Like when painters of the Hudson River School Veered off into abstraction. Shows there's lots going on in the earth's crust, Something solid that takes on such a wavelike form. We can infer fire pushing up from below, Driving all the buckling and subduction, All the while looking so still and peaceful; Reminds me of James Lovelock's AGES OF GAIA: He says that there are endoliths down in rock fissures. Life is churning in the mix, getting a toehold in splinters, As mist drapes it in so many layers of the indefinite. All the more precious, this agate wilderness For its austerity of sapphire blueness Best offset and gazed on by a tiger's eye Whether it be alive or in gemstone form.