Of Colors

by Daniel Christensen  

Famous poems about color,

I found a list of ten

And don't particularly connect with any of them

What Neruda saw in wheat

I never saw,

Having walked through the stalk grass with

Its sticky fingers pawing at my shorts

Like greedy children,

Wheat was never the color of a lover,

To me

Know that I am gentle, but this may change

As we collide, our prerogatives combine,

Our orbits decompose, and a pulmonary

Swell of reciprocal gravity wells

Combust

Time, temperature, saturation,

Autumn mottles the arms of arbors,

Freshwaters froth in estuaries cradle,

Where deeper currents of salience

Do surely meet

Vitruvius’ squared circle of wondrous proportion

Strides off the scrollwork in convoluted undulations

And falls to dust

Time bends the arm of the river

And Dickinson talks of yellow in the rarity of a sunset,

In its bruised hues, sour tongued and hurtful

To the eye is my recollection, or the black tempests that

Swirl upon the suns circular disk, when I gaze at it,

Overlong

Can we know who we are, where we come from

Or where we are going, within any definable

Parameter, and would this knowing render

The miraculous into a genetically designated

Automaton, rather than an observer

Of time’s languid blue-green waters,

Of thunderstruck skies, we gathered beneath,

In puddles of laughter, daring the fall of titanic

Forces, of shoulder borne biers, solemnly

Laid to rest, of gutting orange-red martial fires

And of colors laid to rest

And blue is so often sad or tranquil in verse,

Much ado and much rehearsed

And we know that sea squalls and tempests are often darker

Shades of grays, like the shelf of locks on the brows

Of the old and worn, but blue to me is cool, like

When I am quiet, between a red rage of poems that rise

In the reaching arms of Jinn and depart in murmurs of

Their smoking entrails

And Blake saw the poet as a font of ever replenishing

Dispensations, a diviner of infinite imagination,

And it is an observable phenomenon,

The more one drinks of simple light

Within the spectrum, the more one thirsts

For a deep dive across the eye, across the infrared

And its radiant coals, all the more is burgeoning dams,

The ultraviolet waters burst

Know that I am what I was made, an assemblage of

Constituent elements, acting by will,

Acting by necessity, which was written

Into my bones

A son becomes a steward, whose responsibility is handed

Down, by catalyst, or by increment

A worker becomes a worn vessel, vertebrae

Stretched to their limitations

A pupil to many a departed sage, whose lingering

Voice is the most constant companion, becomes a teacher

To those of their day and age

And purples and yellows and browns and blacks were my layered

Timeline of bruises, weeks, shaded beneath days, standing over

The shoulder of hours, that crowded the whole atlas

Of my flesh, speaking words of venomed hiss,

When glanced across

Colors felt in my white bones

We hold to our communal coil,

To the slow waltz of axial rotation,

As black birds clear the evenings detritus,

And white birds laugh at the limned shores