Finnish Opera

F
Grass grew long in the story.


Pieces clung to bedclothes. In the night he believed he grew taller.
Grass covered the dream of a serpent, eyes sunk in his head, tail of silk clover. The dream translated into silver tone. More serpent heads and the
dream turned into an opera.

It was the opera that made the dreamer famous. Location of opera could be
in any country, could be Antarctica, more likely Finland, where they believe
in silk clover, it is gold in a land of starved desire for summer.

The opera had a clover leaf copied in porcelain by Aalto, the famous
designer, who sewed the clover leaf into a white curtain. He designed a
window for the man when he looks out to sea in his serpent costume.

This opera that begins with a dream traveled
to Rome and Zagreb, traveled across continents, once by camel. The travels became more famous than
the opera. People began to forget whether the grass really had grown long,
and where the serpent came from.

The opera was called by another name and included a gold limousine.
Somewhere in Oceania they added mermaid elves.
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Of harps.
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Crash.
The orange curtain parts
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A gold bubble,
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And bursts against the lips of a bank president
In the grand tier.


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In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings.
Below,
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Silver shiftings,
Rings veering out of rings,
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Grey-green opaqueness sliding down,
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In steel-bright tremors.
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The threaded light prints through them on the pebbles
In scarcely tarnished twinklings.
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Lazy convolutions:
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Athwart a pale casement.
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Striped fish,
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And never touch.
Metallic blue fish,
With fins wide and yellow and swaying
Like Oriental fans,
Hold the sun in their bellies
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Blue brilliance cut by black bars.
An oblong pane of straw-coloured shimmer,
Across it, in a tangent,
A smear of rose, black, silver.
Short twists and upstartings,
Rose-black, in a setting of bubbles:
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On a blue and gold lawn.
Shadows and polished surfaces,
Facets of mauve and purple,
A constant modulation of values.
Shaft-shaped,
With green bead eyes;
Thick-nosed,
Heliotrope-coloured;
Swift spots of chrysolite and coral;
In the midst of green, pearl, amethyst irradiations.

Outside,
A willow-tree flickers
With little white jerks,
And long blue waves
Rise steadily beyond the outer islands.
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