Wedding Ring
No plane of this tortured, jeweled land
That isn’t spinning, waving, facets
Loose-limbed in a band of liquid wind,
An aquarium as much ocean as it is
Roots and sand, a bezelled field of fronds
And blades tethered vaguely to some
Jetty, tendril, cleat: carbon
Sails billowed in the constant gale.
Around the edges of the offing, a blaze
Of bright baguettes rings the sea foam rail
Beneath the downspout prongs of light,
The glaze of dawn, a roiling surge of waves
Set inside a pavé of horizon,
The storm’s melee surrounded by
A crystal throne of haloes in the sky,
The side-stone diamonds of the sun.
June 13th, 2024, Kaiholu
Explanation
This, like “Geode,” is a poem about diamonds, and, specifically, the settings of diamond rings.
It’s something of an elliptical love poem, and a love poem as well to the ocean at dawn, when sometimes a dark sea is fringed with an incandescent rim, sun on distant waves, breaking on the rail of a far reef.
As Cathy says, the rising sun is in a diamond ring setting, a sun “setting.”
The entirety of Kailua Bay seemed like a setting, rimmed with tiny melee diamonds, the pavé, the baguettes, the side stones that surround the central solar diamond of a ring.
The sun is the central diamond, ice white and haloed.
The prongs that hold the diamonds on the horizon in place are the funnels of windspouts that descend from clouds, bearing distant rain in a squall.
Diamonds are made from carbon; cheaper Moissonite diamonds are silicon carbide and can be manufactured. Their inner rainbows and scintillations are even brighter, with more inner fire than natural diamonds.
After a week of being becalmed, it is always reinvigorating to have the trade winds back, where the whole world is again in motion: waves, limbs, fronds, trunks, clouds. The island seems integrated again.
The sky is in fact filled with diamonds. When a white dwarf cools, its helium and hydrogen crystalizes.
Scientists discovered a star in 1992, BPM 37093, fifty light years from Earth, 90% of whose core is below 12,000 degrees Farenheit and has thus cooled to a ten billion trillion trillion carat diamond. They named it Lucy, as it's in the sky with diamonds, after the Beatles 1967 song.
Diamonds are formed on ice planets like Uranus and Neptune, and planets in other, colder solar systems may be diamantine. Stardust is made of nanodiamonds, so the Beatles were right: there are diamonds in the sky.
Kailua is set in the caldera of an immense volcano, the outer rim of which is the reef half a mile offshore. It is also a jewel set in a solar annulus, a ring offered by the universe by which we are psychologically wed to our blazing environment. Such mental insights often cause physiological reactions, so there’s a physical side to metaphors.