A View Of Beauty

We biked up to a small town called Fontaine de Vaucluse. I say up because it was upstream on the Sorgue river which has its source there, welling out of a spring at the base of the Luberon Mountains.

An earlier poem about this same scene is here, just below. I published it last August.

https://westonpparker.substack.com/p/the-light

See what I mean about the light?

  
                A View Of Beauty

       I saw that view again today.
      It had gotten more beautiful,
              far beyond the grip
           of my feeble memory 
    and now, here in its presence,
       surpassing my imagination.
   It hadn’t gotten more beautiful, 
            it simply always was.

  The light amongst the churning 
     bubbles is so brilliantly white
      that a passing mallard duck
         floats like a small vessel,
          brown planks amidship,
      iridescent green at the bow 
and curved deep blue at the stern.

  The mayflies are out in a swarm 
           yet it is only mid April.
                  Below them
         the trout are pooling.
The wisteria is falling all over itself,
        cascading down the bank,
         making an absolute fool
              of anyone nearby.

      Only for the sake of brevity
will I try to ignore these sycamores
   draping their pale spring leaves
           everywhere around us,
       exactly like a divine canopy
     making a speckled spectacle
                      of us all.

       We cannot help ourselves. 
         The light is here and so
              we all must come,
       else we might never know
             why we exist at all.

        No one ever said beauty
         was never brief enough.
           That is how you know
               you have seen it,
        because when it passes
  some small part of us does too.

Trying to describe divinity or maybe hold onto it. The mallard passed through the bubbles in the background.

and me explaining how much snow has just landed back in Colorado and she is skeptical.

This is the posture of someone who is well aware of his luck in being able to see such beauty.

https://westonpparker.substack.com/p/the-light

The source of Sorgue River is the biggest spring in France, 5th biggest spring in the world at 18,000 liters per second and year round temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The river is only 19 miles long from its source to where it joins the much larger Ouvéze River.

From it’s source, the Sorgue River travels 4 miles (as the crow flies) to the town of L’Isle Sur La Sorgue. When it hits the town, it parts and surrounds the town on all sides while passing through several canals all over town. I think it has about 18 waterwheels, some of which still turn. It has two markets that occur on Thursday and Sunday that date back to 1596. I found a header in town with a 1437 date on it.