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Optic


Soft stripes make a sky: pretty blue, fleecy white.
Sun disc blazing, hazed, a white-hot dilation in an icebow iris.
This halo is made from sunrays, teeming through frosted crystals in the cotton folds of cirrus cloud.
Backlight blurs the edges of the boundary trees; it is called bloom, this excess of brightness.
Mid-sky, dropped under the sun, appears a smudged oval of rainbow colours, like a clumsy thumbprint: a thing unknown.
I jot a note, amazed, but busy, I forget.
Evening comes, icy dark and sparkling; time to settle in and refer to notes and fuss at the internet to find a word. I don't fix on one; only infer an explanation of sun-glare refraction through a specific angle of ice crystal.
A partially formed circumzenithal arc, perhaps? This arc turns upwards, fully formed, is called 'the smile in the sky.'
An elliptical beam: exultant surprise.



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