John Olson

Auroral Activity

          There is always auroral activity somewhere over the Earth. Auroral ice, auroral carapace. Everywhere are silhouettes of foxglove splattered on the prison walls, the aromatic gurgling of blood in a spine of vignettes.
          Maelstroms of solar wind, the linen of a wild and roaring light.
          The mind and body mingle like spit in oblivion.
          Auroral light comes largely from electrons hitting oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, the same phenomenon that produces the glow in a neon lighting tube, or the catastrophe of color investing a canvas of ceremonial flint.           Coronal mass ejections send hurricane blasts of plasma into space and black heat and fluorescent harmonies wraith oblivion with flavors of radical silk.
          Here on Earth we look to the sky and its extremes of ghostly furious hips believing in territory and afternoon, clarinets and Newfoundland.
          When I say silk I really mean milk. And when I say milk I really mean curtain. I mean snowshoes, and large turgid radios emitting borscht and Canadian buffalo.
          The story invests itself with the light of the imagination, a tundra of the soul where the hoofs of the caribou imprint the eternally moving narrative of a silent, graceful cartilage, a momentum suggesting attention and trickles of enchanting disquiet. Antlers silhouetted against a dome of aggressive gold.
          I have filled the minutes of early dawn with forgotten summers and guano. Vowels are bats that live in the caverns of consonants. The lurid vigor of morning oozes out of the sky and shapes the day into a large glass horse, a trapezoid counteracting the muscle of possession. Each cloud is a velvety toleration of gravity, a thing like an atmosphere where the vault of the sky gives birth to chandeliers of liquid meaning. Blueprints and Europe are squeezed from a hillside calamitous with trees.
          I asked Bob what my chances were for an aurora that night, my last in Fairbanks. He clicked a couple of keys. “Here’s where we’re seeing a piling up of fast and slow particles. When we plot out what we think is going to happen, our model says we could get some increase in auroral activity later today."
          Bob was right. Prison is not a product of nature. Thus the affirmation that being remains unchanged in its being, whether it be at rest or in motion, pleads steam and vitality.
          This is because the universe is big, yes, unequivocally big, but big in a way that has nothing to do with size. There are no parentheses. There is no punctuation. It is mustard. It is epidermal and everywhere. It is aberrant and nowhere.
          The pure fact of it feels indigo, enlightened and muscular, waves of energy in the meat of a turtle with burning black eyes.

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