Green Sky

by Pamela Carter

The green of the sky throws you, and we fight

in the museum—I, championing

the hue I love and endorse, construing

my job as tutoring my math-y friend.

You argue for representational.

For natural, credible. I believe

in the chartreuse. Green is true. Here, a truth

of emotional value: Skies may

feel green. Skies often shunt blue aside—furors

of dayblack squalls, the brouhaha of dawns

and sunsets in purples and tangerines,

the genuine—yes—green before a storm.

You refuse to budge. Kandinsky was wrong,

and I am a rose-colored fool. You died

Thirty years ago—breast cancer you first

defied. Married, seemed entirely

clear of illness. Resided in the world

like the rest of us. Ages have played out,

but your insistence, facing my tirade,

I still hear. What a great visit—my guide:

you, in your first home. We saw more art,

a dark Louise Nevelson. Ate French fries—

with skins on!—in Dinkytown. So childish

in our confidence about time, the gobs

remaining. The future. Let the horses

be turquoise or roan. Skies, green or your blues

of cloudlessness, like today’s ten thousand.

Such a weird thing, coincidence: I stumble

on a spiral pad—my ancient journal—

hours after, sonnetizing our spat

over the Fauvist sky—and it’s open

to a page headed in red-inked ballpoint,

“AT MUSEUM MPLS.” Instead

of rustling up a prop for my play reading,

I leaf through this log by long-ago me.

More than four decades earlier I wrote,

“So gentle and blue,” of Franz Marc’s horses,

called them proud of themselves. How the same I am.

And not. I sketched—a rock tower, portraits.

Drafted letters, schedules, a list of books

recently read. Ranted. Dreamed. Left sheets blank.

Once a week, winters, I ski. Nothing

dramatic. No double-black-diamond chutes

like Brain Damage which twenty years before

this Wednesday’s Crystal expedition I

managed with good control. I am content

with green and blue groomers and avoiding

high-speed falls, customarily nod off

on the return: geriatric skier.

Not only that, diversions from routines

call for longer recoveries to right

myself, to identify my rhythm.

So much, you wanted to die of old age.

Only fifteen when that hard pea surfaced

under your soft skin, and you told no one.

A wave runs through me. More accurately,

oscillates within. My particles

stir. A few swish around in the room

where you sit. So much has gone on with you

stuck there—I’m sorry! I’m sorry—seldom

have I entered this space. Morning rays slant

into it. You, vividly lit. Although now

I am way older than you, I can summon

our banter—tone, content, the whole shebang—

of this moment in that bright room. Of course,

we marvel—our field has metamorphosed,

chuckle—once-were geologists still pun.

Seamlessly, we resume discussing green.

Doctor Seuss journeys On Beyond Zebra,

invents letters, symbols, creatures. Like him,

Diane Seuss extends her poems. Her thought

peters out, or the chosen form closes,

but she writes on. Where will her pen take her?

Us? For her audience, she suggests steps

off these ledges into unknown descents.

I decide to push my felt tip over

the border, past the end, into thick mist.

Is there more to say about our friendship?

It began by force. I did not choose you.

But you picked me and only one other

to share news of your deadly disease. Fast,

intimacy cropped up. Unlikely start.

Often, I mull incipience. One friend of youth

revealed that my staring every recess

from our classroom window attracted her.

My quiet? My indifference to play?

Her perception of too much solitude

in someone so young? I’ll have to ask her

though her answer may stray from history.

Many of her versions of our teens drift

from my reality. A single past—

our overlap—exists, unmutable,

not nebulous, anything-goes claptrap.

When she proclaims an invention as fact,

I resist the urge to correct. Dispute

might embarrass her. You think I’ve gone weak.

In the beginning, she bossed our friendship,

observed my lacunae as challenges,

instructed me in daring, filled me in

on basics of biology—our own

upcoming bleeding (about which my house

kept an odd silence, as if we might dodge

menarche altogether if no one

spoke its name), and brought me into the world

of pop—Elton John, Supertramp, Zeppelin.

You grew up like me, among folk afraid

to mention warts or farts; the body’s job,

to transport the brain. Unlike me, you met

no peers bent on intercession. On love.

No such fortune befell you. I was blessed.