A Morning In Miniature

Carpet patterns and the swirlings of grain in wooden floors were maps to me of exotic worlds, portal holes for a child to enter and explore places edged on the furthest reaches of the fabulous. Even today, as an old man, I saw a landscape in miniature when morning sunlight came through the window and crept across the room, illuminating a map in the knots and welts of grain rolled out on the pinewood floor. I found myself off on tour swept into the detail along its ravines and imagined trails, into its wild inland, the unfenced territories whose vast subterranean caves well far below what can be seen, the dank dormitories of dream. And then, above the underworld, dry plains paused by rocky outcrops of doubt, the long silences that stretch for miles and curl up in corners when evening falls. The star pitted dark hung with mystery, morse for the mystic, until a sober perspective shrank the sublime back into a smaller space to fit ordinary sight and became the comforting familiarity of a well trodden wooden floor, aged, uneven, basking in the morning's honeyed light.