With its coal-colored hat,
Proud triangular hat,
The yellow stood – dreaming
House and sunflower faces.
The green met the yellow
As you and I, beloved, have met
In dreams, the green
Dreaming itself as field astir.
The good and bad from yellow
Were born: you at the kitchen counter
Cutting lemons for lemonade,
Your humming itself lemonade,
You and I reading on the cottage lawn
Or quietly picnicking on the lawn
As bees hummed in pink-white petals,
As the sky sang its honey of poems.
A muted yellow, too, was seen:
Your face sickly, you lying in bed,
That last month a face of muted yellow.
The green – field, forest – rang
Its bells: your beauty one summer day
In the late 80s clothed with
a green and white polka dot dress,
you leaning against a wooden fence,
your leg lifted like a ballerina’s,
the classical pianist, too,
steeped in the emerald-green of summer power,
our conversations themselves that time
wide-ranging, golden-green
fields astir.
Your rainbow road pulled me along
Like a kaleidoscope of song.
Then the blue house, blue married
To white. The porch, the sliding door’s
Silhouettes were a single flow,
The cries of children submerged
In the slice of an orange glow.
How much we had, how much we shared
Years and years ago.
I can’t count the mornings that began
With you whipping up some eggs,
coaxing the toast onto the plate,
Orange juice coaxing my morning into Great.
Like one who lives in a house by the beach,
Like a swimmer drawn daily to the beach,
I awoke to the sounds of your motion,
Your cooking, footsteps, the pianist’s fingers, my ocean,
A presence, a love clothed in speech.
Oh blue married to white, my home,
Blue waxing lyrical a past, like foam.
And there it was, the twilight,
sprawling, encompassing the blue house and me,
with its red eye, or some crimson wound, some stain,
I felt would never die, or would like flotsam
Find me again and again,
Ripening, deepening into a net
Of your absence, your violet. And yet –
What vigor, what vim still went on
To color the wanderer’s sorrow,
To etch in the stars, angelic powers;
How much of you had heightened the indigo.
The sadness would go on – but wasn’t
Sufficiently ample or wide
To overwhelm: you played this rainbow road
Like a seven-string guitar from the other side.
My delight, my merriment would blaze,
Be emblazoned with you for my remaining days,
Your absence my sadness and wonder mixed,
Your presence flaming in unfamiliar ways.
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