Colors Passing Through Us

MARGE PIERCY (excerpt)

Purple as tulips in May, mauve

into lush velvet, purple

as the stain blackberries leave

on the lips, on the hands,

the purple of ripe grapes

sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,

like a new flower in a bud vase

on your desk. Every day

I will paint you, as women

color each other with henna

on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,

as coals after the fire is banked,

the cardinal in the feeder,

the roses tumbling on the arbor

their weight bending the wood

the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit

hanging their globes on the glossy tree,

orange as pumpkins in the field,

orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs

who come to eat it, orange as my

cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,

yellow as a hill of daffodils,

yellow as dandelions by the highway,

yellow as butter and egg yolks,

yellow as a school bus stopping you,

yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing

song of all the things you make

me think of, here is oblique

praise for the height and depth

of you and the width too.

Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.

Green as mint jelly, green

Ask For Nothing

PHILLIP LEVINE

Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward as a gift from no known god.
The plane trees along the canal bank,
the few valley poplars, hold their breath
as you cross the wooden bridge that leads
nowhere you haven’t been, for this walk
repeats itself once or more a day.
That is why in the distance you see
beyond the first ridge of low hills
where nothing ever grows, men and women
astride mules, on horseback, some even
on foot, all the lost family you
never prayed to see, praying to see you,
chanting and singing to bring the moon
down into the last of the sunlight.
Behind you the windows of the town
blink on and off, the houses close down;
ahead the voices fade like music
over deep water, and then are gone;
even the sudden, tumbling finches
have fled into smoke, and the one road
whitened in moonlight leads everywhere.

Ask Me

William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.

A Small Treatise on Analogy

Janusz Szuber

In the car, before the synagogue in Lesko,

Waiting for Madame M.R.,

I watched a trapped bee trying

To force the slanted windshield,

Its efforts composing a simple

Parable about existence.

I picked up the notebook in which I'm

Now recording this incident, and with its help

I directed the insect toward the slightly open door,

Halfway believing that one day

Someone will treat me the same way.

From they carry a promise, selected poems,

Alfred A. Knopf, 2009

Dr. Seuss

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

Proust

But when nothing remains of a faraway past, after the living beings have died, the objects destroyed, there alone remain--frailer yet more lively, less material yet more tenacious, more faithful--the fragrance and the taste, for a long time lingering as spirits, recalling, awaiting, hoping, upon the ruins of everything else, supporting without bending, as upon a nearly intangible droplet, the enormous edifice of memory.

Langston Hughes

Poetry is the human soul, entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words.