Sunday, August 21, 2011

NHM

As I walk through the hall of minerals and gemstones,
I find inspiration in the naturally formed;
the pink prisms of rhodochrosite,
the blue and opaque pale green cliff of azurite and malachite, bonded together.

Uninspired human craft uninspires;
Uninspired nature inspires to the highest degree of art;
White marble from a mountain carved into larger-than-life Zeus,
And the miniscule, chalky white blades of gypsum rectangled together;
They are the same.

As I bend over a crystal ball, my chest tightens.
The rock is quartz; the sphere, perfect.
My eyes strain to look through it, to penetrate the light on the surface
And make sense of the black inside.
But I cannot look through to three dimensions.
I can only look at the two-dimensional image on the surface,
At the three hundred and sixty degree mini Cinerama screen that bends concavely.
I hover over, wanting to be immured in the center.

The crystal would be a marble for a giant to play with,
Or a hole,
Except it has a heavy weight and reflects the world.
It reflects and turns upside down not what is behind me, like a spoon would, but what is in front of me,
What I would see if I could look through the ball.

The minerals do not struggle with creation as humans do with art;
The minerals form through inertia, molecules reacting to each other, sliding and connecting over the millenia,
A never-ending work that continues even when human hands find them, carve them out, and put them under glass display cases;
Thin strands of a spider’s thread bridge the red peaks of a monazite.

The symmetrical epitaxy of silver rutile on blue hematite,
The mystery of a ball of quartz,
Are what we seek to achieve;
Or triphylite: LiFePO4.






The abbreviated shorthand makes the minerals a part of the big table;
The equation gets at the underlying structure and leaves the wonder leftover.

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