by James Gurley

--Issac Newton, 1672--

Just now the sun draws a beam
of light through this room
to the bowl of fruit on the table--
the apple, the plum, the apricot, each
takes on a new color.
Thus the visible spectrum reveals itself
as more than white light,
the very air we see

in a perpetual tremor.
Every object that beam touches
shimmers with a halo
of atoms pulsing out into space.
When I pass a prism through the beam
invisible threads untangle
like strands of yarn

shaking out the last flames
of the sun. You have to love colors
to see what's beautiful
in this world, to name them
as they appear on the screen now--
from violet to red the reflection opens
new mysteries that the eye
brings together, the spectrum
a coherent language.

Through a series of prisms and lens,
we learn these fundamental truths:
the light falling from the heavens
conveys to us a broken image
and we reconstruct
the world, these topsy-turvy
images from our own blindness,
from what shines forth.