Lightspell

 
From my journal, May 1994:

"Did you see the annular eclipse? It was a perfect day for it here: high- clouded blue, the trees leafed out or leafing, still pale green, a trifle rumpled with unpacking. Light breezes in the dappled grass. Clean rainwashed air. By one, the flawless clarity of light began to dim. A queer dark, neither dusk nor overcast. Underexposed. The moon worked strange equations of light and space and time: as if the world were bright but somehow distant, or later on but here, or nowhere, now. Sharp shadows, and a cooler spectrum, a flattening and heightening of space- time, like a scene in a camera obscura. Like a view of Delft. (Vermeer composed his pictures through a camera obscura, casting its image on the canvas, painting light not line. It gives a dreamlike surreality.) A few birds clamored in the trees, confused or settling.

"Then the air was tranced. The trees were underwater, underhill. Elsewhere. Dark-dazzled, like a world enstoned in crystal: dark within, but lightedged, and refracting light.. Glimpsed sidelong through film, the sun was crescent, heavy, like a raindrop streaming; but of fire. Ablaze but coldly: vermeil, silver-gilt. The oddest thing I’d not expected, and
it stopped me with a shock of wonder. (I must have read of it, long since; but I’d forgotten.) Through the screen of new leaves, at the fringes of the shadows, the sun cast thousands of light crescents, imaging itself. It spelled itself on earth.

"This evening clear, the sky almost colorless, faint gold; then the deepest endless blue and Venus riding air."