Kaleidoscope

[|Kaleidoscope]I

Like a scene out of //Through the Looking Glass.// Sleight of breeze, cloud trim, April's yellow-lace rain-silk embroidered monogram on the grass. Table and chairs, arrangeable and light as doll-house furniture, are nudged in place by your daughters. The table is set.

We look down on the plot of a chess board: there are thick tea mugs, some bread on a dish. We all move at once. Spoons chime, milk is poured. In conversation there is give and take, and words for every momentary wish stir us to memory for a story's sake.

In this one hour, the world's a lucid dream to wake us up. Fancy casting each whim's throw ahead of its own thought. To be and seem in the same light. For just imagine it, and little girls--where did Franny go?-- are darting after butterflies with Annette.

II

Then, as though we lacked nothing but a lens to bring the hour to focus, you brought out, like a relic from the ancient science of Seeing Into Things, a kaleidoscope, antique, home-made: an oblong, bronze-plate tube of mirrors, angled like a microscope

above ... not the metal-clipped candy glass used to squeeze the life out of specimens, but a revolving dish, on which we place whatever shapes and textures we can find to see what happens, like experiments in cell structure, or the origin of mind

revealed in the differentiated, minutely starred fragments of what it sees: not just a duller nature magnified, but looked at from all sides, where the plate shows a single leaf its myriad symmetries, a dropped petal its shattered, hybrid rose.

III

But here's a cardboard shoe-box of coloured foil papers--good for what?--carefully unwrapped from eaten chocolates and savoured for their shine and glitter. Take off the lid, reach inside and rummage for any three raffle tickets of colour--blue, green, red--

tear them in shapes and shape them in turn on the plate. The pieces are every bit as skittery as the breeze, their pattern lightsome and precarious by design, touched like us by each spring freshet's buffet that might at any moment blow it clean.

But look inside the glass for the moment. The intricate fan-thin pleats of mirror open like a map, and their radiant triplings merge and unfold with the stop-play unwinding action of an orrery, whirled in a starlit //primum mobile//.

IV

Or look again. Did the scientist feel a levity like ours on the first night, when he watched, wide eyed, the undivided cell and its hardly-conceived-of DNA turn on his dish into a gemmed chaplet that stretched and pulled at itself, came away

unglued, and drifted free, linked and unlinked, and so for the first time showed signs of life? Like us, he saw every least grain was instinct with a form, looked in and knew his heart broken and enlarged by a mirror that itself was almost his smallest and his truest part.

Turn the dish again. The bright paper stirs like a tea leaf in a cup, a single spore that on reflection shatters into futures we know already, as if it will all be, oh, just more of the same. Unless we see the more the drift of the pattern that will show.

V

Think of all you could put there in its stead, for example. The mind spins. Take a stray branch from the lawn and lay it down. The dead wood under glass will break in parts and show rootless shoots that ramify, in turn, say, to the //Almond Tree in Blossom// by Van Gogh,

whose upper branches everywhere extend into blue space, and even upside down still topple out in flower to no end. Now here's a penny. Set it on the wheel and by the laws of increase, stone by stone, a city of bronze in the ornate style

of rococo gabled roofs and gilt trees will fall away far as the eye can see to vanishing points that are ubiquitous. Or put your hand there Emma, and find in each inchling finger that points wildly in the crystal globe, your radiant reach.

VI

Let my last thought, when the specimen day has turned full circle, and its facet of capricious vision is put away, be for the shoe box itself of dark scraps, candy papers and foils, set in the closet among the dog-eared game boards and old maps.

When I was a child, we too had a box stored on a back shelf. On its side, spelled out in bold was "Important Papers": the stocks, last wills and testaments kept from view, and insurance policies not talked about. All in one place, because you never knew ....

But there's a future in a box like this. Its scraps, like pictures stored away for now, keep their sights in the dark, their prophecies of what time will show, having a place, we hope, there at the side of the unlifted-down motionless glass of the kaleidoscope.