Prose Poem: Secondary Colors

Secondary Colors

There’s a photograph I’ve never taken.  Midway up the butte I look north, across the green valley, to the sandstone hills beyond.  The trees of the valley belie their surroundings, an oasis from an unseen well holding back the arid.  The sandstone hills traverse a spectrum of deep red to orange then whites so bright the sun seems to burst from the rock itself.  If I raise my eyes up slightly higher, I see the towering mountains add a third stratum to the untaken image.  Gray spruce on the mountains recast the green of the valley in muted colors and eventually give way to bald granite and limestone.  Finally, the sky, so bright I have to imagine it’s blue, completes the color field.  I never brought my tripod to this spot; never marked the ground where I stood so I could return during that ephemeral moment, when the snowcap adds a penultimate veneer to the reflected light that passed through the lense to chemical and plastic.  I wonder, however, if I had that photograph, would I feel the wind ruffle my shirt and the heat on my skin as I do now?