Desert Jasper

As an improbably high bird hovering on a cloudless day
Or the view from a god’s chariot
One spies more than desert on the smooth glyphic surface.
Spread below run the serrated lines of a jagged coastline, complete with the white spume of breakers against umber shoreline rocks
while the solemn blue of the sea, shifts colors in a smooth drift away from the coast.

It is only now, behind the shoreline that comes the desert.
But a desert of sand, of stone, or both?
Does a zephyerd breeze waft inland from the shoreline,
or an incessantly hot wind?
Or is the air glistening-hot, and motionless, under the fiery sun?

And on closer inspection, could the dull, drab hint of green
 bespeak of grasses, shrubs, even trees on that smooth plain?
Teeming with panoptic possibilities; a view, too distant to discern.

Perchance a bead fallen from a careless goddess’ bracelet,
a lost token-piece from an Olympian's gaming table
discarded and misplaced in some heedless gesture?

Or perhaps a keepsake;
A touchstone quarried from the ether of a mythic world, once dreamt
but too dear for use?

And so this suspended blueprint of a distilled world in miniature
lies waiting.