When I was almost 54, I glanced out the BART window and was dazzled by sun diamonds.

It was a bright winter morning and I was on a train headed to San Francisco. My seat was on the port side, and as we barreled above some vacant lots that angled near the tracks, the rising sun picked out thousands of shards of broken glass and turned them into jewels.

I was struck by the loveliness trash can make. I tried to capture that idea in a sonnet about the accidental invention of the kaleidoscope. I took gross liberties with history (sorry, Sir David Brewster), and I got to use the word “sublime.”

I learned what sublime means in high school chemistry class. It’s our verb for the rare transformation of a solid to its gaseous state without passing through a liquid phase. The common example of sublimation is how dry ice melts to gas without ever showing us liquid CO₂.

I like the kaleidoscope sonnet I started that day and it’s been one of the most favored poems I’ve shown to friends. So I have submitted it to a number of small poetry publications. It has never been selected. Other sonnets, less good in my opinion, have been printed instead. I suspect there’s a lesson in that.

Today I’m publishing Kaleidoscope myself:

Imagining the first kaleidoscope,
an instrument by accident destroyed
when some unbidden son’s forbidden grope
resulted in a crash … That kid enjoyed
the broken glass – so trash to beauty twirled,
the same way freeway cloverleafs are grand,
an oil slick’s a gleam, and car tapes hurled
on pavement curl like ribbon off God’s hand.

A storm makes sculpture out of tenements.
A beam of light bejewels a vacant lot.
A gated enclave’s nothing but a fence
outside, yet every fallen leaf’s a yacht.
I note the dirt. I recognize the grime.
But when I squint at squalor it’s sublime.