A World of Light

If I close my eyes now, I can still see them canopied by the visor of my sunhat: three children islanded on a narrow rim of earth between the huge crack-willow that they squat before, hushed, poised to net a frog, and the pond the frog will jump to (it got away) a glass its dive will shatter. The unbroken image pleases my mind’s eye with its density, such thick crisscross of tree-trunk, earth, and tall grass I see no breach, no source for the light that steeps it but a blue burning in the pond’s green glass. The grass withered, the tree blew down, earth caught the frog, the children grew. Sky’s ice-blue flame teased along the wick it would consume.