Poem : Colour-de-Roy

Bolinus brandarus

Purple has a history of being a royal color.

This is mainly to do with how hard it is to make purple dyes.

It's hard to make purple dye because the first real source for the color was snail mucus.

Mythology tells us that Heracles was walking on the beach when his dog found one of these snails and began to chew on it. The dog's mouth filled with the purple saliva. This color became what is today called Tyrian purple.

The snails were bolinus brandarus. The spiny dye-murex. The snail has a mucus that it uses to paralyze its prey. It is also a defense mechanism. To get the stuff for dye you either crush the snail or you milk it. You milk a snail by poking at it until it secretes the mucus.

Then you make robes for your king or queen.

--

Colour-de-roy

The dog you made us get runs off down the beach
despite being called over over over he refuses to come back

We got him because of his sad face
because of the two small scars across the front of his nose

Little square bites of gray in the blonde

Tyrian purple

I say you made us get because you made us go
to the shelter to the hill the shelter sits on

I like the dog fine I wish he’d come when you called him

The beach has tuned itself into a throb of seaweed
after a storm the sand is raw and untouched

Over the small hill the dog is tearing at the earth
shaking itself in a tug of war

He has eaten a spiked shell has lodged it in his mouth

A hundred arrow-sharp spines piercing its mouth
now stained purple the eyes filled with purple saliva flooding purple

All around him horseshoe crabs line themselves

Their heads inland and scorpion tails out to sea
each and every one of them dead

They wanted something somehow in their blind eyes they knew
it was just over this or that scrub of bleaching grass

They died crawling from one world into another

Poem-A-Day #365 : One Year

One Year

Let the year — crack like an egg
the yew of it drying out your mouth

                    Spit
                    if you can

Amber
if you can

                    — There
is a bird inside you it is
flapping the cage apart

Poem-A-Day #321 : January

January

The aloes are growing -
it is cold - but - they shoot themselves at the windows
dark green - moving - outside the snow becomes fog - becomes breath

Poem-A-Day #310 : When Lilacs Last

This is an erasure of the last section of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" is my attempt at distillation. Whitman used 100 words where 1 would work. He was amazing and infuriating for this reason. I think this version gets the same point across. Quickly.

You can read the full poem at Poetry Foundation.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

16
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.

I cease from my song for thee,
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.

Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

Poem-A-Day #290 : Nightscape

Nightscape

On your skin

A color like purple

It thighs and glides across surfaces

A woman is thrown into the pool of a taxi

There is night and then there is city

Each thing defines itself against the void of space

Your eyes are glares

The streetlight blinks yellow banishing color

Mono

A wish to be the reflection in your sweat

The smell of garbage

A rat across your foot

Uber and crash

Your teeth are violet

Poem-A-Day #266 : Highway at Night

Highway at Night

          Curving sounds

                                        green in their echo

               There is evidence that everything will not be fine

It moves

                        in that moving it settles like salad dressing

          and the curve is a spoon

                                                            How sound curves

                                           enters the canyon

                              of your ear

                                                            settles there sets up home erupts

            The drum

                             a sort of rainstorm


                                                            Sound of snow

                                            Volcanoes of color becoming solid objects in a field

          a herd of rams waiting under electric lines

Poem-A-Day #264 : Unrest

Unrest

Wake and the arm is cold again - outside the blankets
like it wants to escape the comfort

The arm wants to tell you something - you were sleeping and it has a message for you

There are marks along the skin - birth and otherwise
notice how uneven the color and the veins are so visible in the darkness

The sound of celery breaking

Knees collapsing on pavement and the glitter of light on everything

The arm wants you to remember fear and agency

The arm wants to sweat with you
there is the sound of a siren - it is the sound of all sirens - the room fills then empties of it

A moment before the most beautiful dream ever forgot - it lingers pinkly in the haze of the brain - calls in sing-song that it should be returned to

This arm has thoughts of going through the window - it cannot understand how one sleeps in troubled times like these - there should be blood on the steps of the capitol

Blood is hard to clean

If it is forced under the covers to warmth - the arm will form itself into a mouth and begin to whisper all the promises that have been broken

If it stays in the cold it will purple - possibly loose itself and never come back

Poem-A-Day #258 : Species Complex

Species Complex

.
There a body
orange black under sodium-vapor light

Eyes a void
                    don't look in the void

What colors the body
in day

.
The butterfly
lands on the drying plant

It is November why is this thing living

Wings fold unfold
                    scales are enormous eyes
that move
like snakes entering narrow spaces

They are liquid

The impulse to bathe in the copper wetness is unbearable

.
It is easy to say - we are all the same - without enacting it

Language is a seed
                    it will sit dumbly on the pavement until watered

Language is a turbine without water
a magnet
                    coiled in copper wire
left to collect dust

Feel the sound of water through the tunnels of the dam

The turbines long to be harnessed to it - they rub themselves raw
in this longing

.
Sound of buzzing

The body
                    yellowed - like paper - always everything reduced to paper

There is a thing in that
a sort of comment on ledgers and graphs and the way our lives are grid-ed

On every corner a lamp destroys the color of the world

Sepias the entirety

The body and the other body
                    every body

Jaundices - lands on the dying milkweed
growing between the sidewalk joins

Hums

Corrects pitch until in line with the light

Repeating Patterns of Mimicry (2006)
Axel Meyer

Poem-A-Day #249 : Nearku

I've invented a new poetry form. The Nearku. It's basically a very close haiku. So close you could mistake it.

There are no rules other than the second line must be longer in syllables than the first and last and the lines must come very close to the 5-7-5 form of a haiku.

The idea is that in nearing the old form, it reaches for perfection that can never be achieved.


Nearku

The umbrella is spinning

In loose moorings - a rainbow movement

The world around us grays

Poem-A-Day #172 : light / The dream

My walk home from the bar was less and more than the night warranted.


light / The dream

Awake from the dream to the room bathed in blue full-moon light

The dream was about bloodied people in the street a woman drug behind a car

Full-moon light is about underwater colors and the fractals of time crashing on the walls

Your eye will take this all in simultaneously because we are able to hold two things in our two hands

The broken evening will become the fractured skin and blue light will stand in for red blood

Her blood was possibly purple and the street was colored in sodium vapor yellow

And the cars were just steel on tires moving endlessly forward in space

Poem-A-Day #128 : Green

I was just as obsessed by colors and light as an 18 year old as I am as a 35 year old. Below the poem in my journal is one of my favorite bits of poetry. From David P. Young's The Man Who Swallowed A Bird:

Once I swallowed a bird,
felt like a cage at first, but now
sometimes my flesh flutters and I think
I could go mad for joy.

The original:

Green (3/17/99)

Calm, cool

The color of springtime country

Makes me long for tall grass

to run through

roll in

Lay and look at the sky

Surf the endless

fields of ocean

Calm, cool

Next to anything it is

perfect

Always relaxing

Nature in color

The edit:

Green

Long for the tall grass - the shade of big land

the stalks - thick and whip-like

The sound of speed - of knee high by the fourth of July

the thickness of summertime maple leaves

The sky bleaches against all this boiling pigment

all of this dampness - this scent of grass

The most restful of states - run in it - let it stain your jeans

the feeling of wet - the prime of your life

Poem-A-Day #62 : Fusion

Fusion

Ink on water - the shooting lines
are instant and then sudden - they pause
before combining

They darken then vanish

Lines of veins pumping across hydration
- absorb this and then release
in pink and running glass

Poem-A-Day #31 : Night

Night

          Blue shadow on the cheek

                    Smudge of gray ash in the fireplace

                              At night the vines hug the walls they are heart-shaped purple and bleeding on the bricks

          I'd say they were bougainvillea but that's obvious they may as well be ivy itching at the stone walls and pulling mortar from the cracks hiding animals hiding so many windows

                    You hide blue with orange

                              The cadmium is opaque is breaking

           In the YouTube video they show the woman covering the man's face with thick tangerine-colored concealer then with thick beige concealer then with rouge

          I don't get a five o'clock shadow

                    The bricks pop and fall the mirror hides itself

Blue Crayola

This is the oldest poem that I have saved on my computer. It is a poem from September 2000. There are poems with older roots floating around, but this one has the oldest modification date.

I can't tell you what the original inspiration was, it is lost to me. I think it had to do with that time of year when twilight grows long and the sky takes on that amazing blue glow the last few hours before full dark.

What Joan Didion calls the blue hours. It happens in late May and early September. The start and finish of summer. The sky announcing the growing season with a trumpet blast.

Here is the poem. It's just called Blue Crayola:

4 generations of logos on Prussian (now Midnight) blue

Water wrapped in wood

Dipped in cornflower
And cased in sugar
Crisp as the sky, yet
Blurred as the oceans
Atlantis in a paper cup
Neptune’s pen of pens
The melting point of wax
Becomes indigo crushed
A missile from the Blue Man Group
Chew-toy of the young and famous
And not-so-famous
Implement of famous nights and devastating floods
A place of worship for faeries
One hundred years old
A Tim Burton movie’s inspiration
Blue Crayola,
September 2000

I have two versions saved. One with the blue words, and one without. I like the idea behind the coloring of the words. That some of them clearly connect to 'blue' and some seem as far from it as can be. Like 'wax' and 'worship'. In my head I can invent new connections for the color and the word.

I cannot be sure if they are the same as the ones I had 13 years ago.

The forgetting of thought process is not a problem for me. Not scary. But it is interesting how ephemeral that thought can be. When I wrote this I am sure it seemed to be important. Imperative, even. I bet I turned this in to workshop. I bet people said nice things.

What would I write today if I was meditating on a blue crayon? Which is what this seems to be ultimately. A thought on a childhood object written at the end of childhood. I think it would be similar, touch on subjects like these. Though Neptune and the sea feel more green to me now. And I think Blue Man Group is too obvious, but the missile is good. I don't like the obtuse references to actual blue things. I feel like it relies too heavily on that. I want it to come sideways. From non-blue parts of the universe.

September is definitely blue. I will have to revisit this.

In the meantime go read Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue by Joshua Cohen.

Pantone

Pantone was founded in the 1950s in New Jersey. It is now best known for those fan-shaped booklets of color charts. They have a proprietary system of color coding, PMS, that is used by fashion designers and governments alike.

Pantone claims that the color numbers and pigment values for all 1114 colors in their PMS are intellectual property. In other words, they believe they own the makeup of the colors.

Honeysuckle...apparently.

Every year they hold a meeting to pick the color of the year. The color that most matches the zeitgeist of the moment. In 2011 they picked Honeysuckle and said this about the choice:

In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues.

2013 is the year of Emerald. Here is what they say:

Emerald brings a sense of clarity, renewal and rejuvenation, which is so important in today's complex world.

And I mean...sure. We need rejuvenation. And I do love me a jewel tone. But...really? And the descriptions are really similar. Honeysuckle is stimulating and will get adrenaline going and Emerald will aid rejuvenation. I guess I'm not seeing a difference.

Tell me that pink makes us think of birth, of spring, that it reminds of of life. Tell me that green is vibrant, is life in full blush, is summer. Give me something a bit more...evocative of color.

The Cotswolds. Every year is Emerald.

Color is emotion. Is sense memory. That deep green reminds me of the western coast of Wales. Of the long expansive fields dotted with crags of steel-colored rock. There are probably sheep out there. Maybe mythical creatures. It reminds me of my childhood. Of a long bike ride through the Cotswolds that ended at a large tower in the middle of nowhere. The sun was dappled and I was wearing a neon green hat that said 'London' across the front of it. I probably had on acid-washed jeans. Because I was a baller when I was 12.

The pink makes me think of pigs. That makes me think of Charlotte's Web. Which makes me sad. But in a really great nostalgic kind of way. I'm thinking of the annual Centre County Grange Encampment and Fair in Pennsylvania. There are these long tents full of pens of animals, each a prize-winner or an attempted winner. Rows of rabbits, chickens, pigs, cows, ponies. Crates of vegetables and pies. The grange in PA is one of the few left where people stay over in tents on the property. The waiting lists are so long that the tents are willed to the next generation to keep hold of them. My father's mother shared a tent with her sister. People would build out the tents to have working showers, kitchens, porches. They pimped that shit out. And it was terrible-fabulous.

These are the things color brings up. Not rejuvenation. Not stimulation. Those are dull PR words for 'buy our shit'. Pantone is stupid for thinking it can copyright memory or nature. It would be telling me that a smell is not mine. That the way magnolias makes me cry is somehow not mine. That the color of the sky in early fall is not mine. That the fogged glass after a hot shower is not mine.

I will allow 2013 to be the year of Emerald if for no other reason then it means I can imagine an endless bike ride in the middle of nowhere every day. I will not allow that Pantone had anything to do with getting me there.