Song To Midnight -stephanie pope

if I were a salted ache, the ache
would dream my darkness like a flower
and were chrysanthemum to drown

would pull me by the hour
a dome weight terrible in sacrifice
drawn out to dream a child

and the child lives in rounded play a color
enlarged in dimension and deformed
by indefinite space

my poet's blindness lives such things blind
these makings in conceptual dimension, make
light (against me) what merry birds will borrow

worthless and secret, pressed
against each other's one in vaulted space
concave and weighing down...an angel

rolls its rr's...is it an angel, where lowly rhythm
sings carried in ears of separation and in years
colored by marble play and depth

continuing what makes in pearl
and glass and gel
and sculptures thus

in hyper-speed and cavernous earth
in ultraviolet intricates
who sing

what angel comes what thread
in alleluia plays the child this night
of what celestial air and marbled color sea

shall I come bouncing blue-green, too
against my own dark-flowered crib
of having lived

so iridescently--shall I come sing
in lesser lights
the art

*********** (en kata poetry series) ************

-Iridescent surfaces on degraded glass
As glass is exposed to water in its burial environment some of its components can be dissolved by the water and carried away (leached out). This generates a thin surface layer of glass (a "skin") that has a different composition than the undergraded bulk of glass. Often there is a thin layer of air between the corroded surface and the bulk. The corroded surface layer on old glass acts as a thin film and can give rise to iridescence on glass.