Mountain Mornings

My third day in the San Bernadino mountains and I'm getting wise to the pattern. The skies have clouded up in the afternoons, permitting sunlight on one grove but not on its neighbor. Momentarily, rain falls--hardly enough to spot my car. But again today the dawn is clear, and the morning sky, crystalline and blue. The water's surface faithfully reflects the trees; the lake is still asleep. And the air...well it is what I came here for.

I thought of William Carlos Williams' gorgeous poem: Dawn.

ECSTATIC bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.

Changing Colors, gouache by Shirley Cleary. Click on the picture for a closer look.