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| Ode to Color A man in a red GEORGIA baseball cap wearing a sweatshirt with a red bulldog over his heart, sitting in a subway car, the smell of his poverty much too strong but I stay out of weakness and pity: his dark skin has gone through fire and his hands and arms and who knows how much more of him wear the ropy scars: I watch him not wanting to stare as he draws out of a pocket dangling from a long rope at his waist a red-plastic compact that he opens; the mercury pool he dips and dips his face towards as though to stanch the fire (who knows what he sees) he shuts it opens it shuts it then like a black Narcissus he has to re-open and stares. Maybe it solidifies him, all I know is steeped in my own pool, I keep seeing this portrait in red.  What's he trying to say with Red on Maroon or Purple, White and Red? Has Rothko taken away saying, pulverized the identity of things so we lean back on an imaginary grassy mat gazing at these stacked heavens— or has he broken in on our silence so you and I can breathe and stretch our arms again? Push the button on Cornell's Lighted Dancer she glows cobalt blue. Red Sea Bird wrasse is longnosed and blue. Spend your life inside window's wind-eye framed by goldenrod gazing at exhalations of sky. Rosettes are not poppies but moments of attention burned into the wall. God's essence would ensure his existence. Can one also say the essence of color ensures its existence? What color is God. God's the color of water. Basket lady semi-toothless yodelled so sweetly I wished the earplugs from my ears and tossed some change in insisted I pick a bunch of her flowers crudely rubber-banded Yes, I like that one too blood-red rose and two pale lilac roses I'd never seen that hue before never seen a self so abandoned to goodness before. A color will carry you around the world immediately Why this poverty when we deal with colors? Why comparisons? Birch leaves are like small, pale-yellow coins, sparsely attached to twigs which are of what hue? Lilac, from the lilacs, and violet, from the violet. Red as the blonde-bearded face bloodied by another fighting over deposit cans or as miscarried week-old life draining out a full week between my legs. What does reddish green or bluish orange or yellowish black look like? Black is not enough to show the absence of light. What if colors at night look the way they do to the colorblind in daylight? When you take me against the rock still pool sizzled to buttery glare while others leap from cliffs in green frolic where shoal almost hardens to field—stripped into memory what will we become? blue-toned stripes behind the lime-green bar being brushed by a wet black feather. What color do you like best, Tatu? Black, black! And you, Washoe. What color? Red, red! Why? Beautiful, beautiful! Think of a bluish orange, a reddish green, or a yellowish violet, the same feeling as in the case of a southwesterly north wind. I envy the cuttlefish and squid; wish I could think color- become any mottled hue into which I sink for cover. What color is The Barber of Seville? Teal-gray and teak (or bamboo) with not a trace of red or black. Umbria is ochre and rust dark brown as the centers of sunflowers keening in late-summer sun. Bologna is always foggy grey. And Rome? Goldenrod. And Paris? Peacock blue and grey. Nantucket? Grey and more grey-blue studded with Black-eyed Susan yellow. What about Tokyo? New York? Which city is tomato-red? Mexico City. But you've never been. That doesn't matter. I like the color of your coat. It's brown. I wouldn't call it brown. Call it the color of bark, call it the impasse of color. The Knobbed whelk on the beach whose insides caught the light bright orange twilight siren song we had to approach. —There must be mussel inside —It's just the shell color made stronger by the bending of the light a color so pearly rich our footsteps swung toward it as toward the setting sun's mirror. Diamondback rattler had colors impossible to recall or name: snake-color will have to do. Maybe fear blanches things of color and mystery bloods them—the fuzzy fruited heart of the sago palm lint-covered ribs pulled back and there the small smooth rosy heartbeats lay. Go in the closet or the bathroom with these mushrooms and wait longer than you think and then their crowns will glow from underneath sample these chicken o' the woods the mycologist climbed trees to pick more yellow less orange and edible walk along the beach late afternoon find two halves of an Eastern cockle still joined splayed open rust to rose their own internal sunset. Ancient idea that colour is afterthought. Often when I settle down to work I begin by noting the icy clearness of the sour blue sky. You cannot approach color as if coming in a barn door. Her molten hair beside the stone-grey caviar light has tigered its way into a figure black sofa speckled red with people eating as flecks of words glint and rise in an evening sky until they fuse: vermilion-gold-blue. Vermilion cannot do everything Matisse enjoyed saying, but had he seen the virgin's vermilion gown with puffed mandarin-orange upper sleeves tapered to violet-blue satin at the wrists and the startled Mary from Recanati holding her hands at chest height from the force of unclasping them from prayer ready to push the air of the intruder? Whatever else Lotto meant I know he meant that red as did Frederic Leighton for the sleeping Flaming June a color so stunning it goes by many names: cinnabar red, scarlet, China red and calypso. Even God, so this story goes- as though the angel clothed in pastel blue holding a stalk of lilies would pale at the task- flew down wearing the same shocking vermilion cinched by blue and reached into her room. And I could spend an afternoon worshiping at the foot of such rich hues and did. When we are bathed in what radiates we forget everything that borders on yellow or blue. We imagine an absolutely pure red, fine carmine suffered to dry on white porcelain. White to ward off the distracting din of colors Today all the colors have been mixed together. No harmony, the result is grey, as Goethe knew and the sky storing up its first snow, contains them all. If I say a piece of paper is pure white and if snow were placed next to it and it then appeared grey . . . Lemon-yellow-black was my idea of the underwing of the grasshopper but the carmine in connection with the sunset is better. Who shouted with glee when the color blue was born? Lapis lazuli ground up as paint once more precious than gold— gold the color a Jew was made to wear in the Middle Ages, a mark of shame until Michelangelo on the highest reach of wall beneath the ceiling of the Cappella Sistina painted Moses in flowing robes of yellow painted Abraham Isaac Sarah all all in golden yellow Yellow for Goethe the color nearest the light Blue still brings a principle of darkness with it (to be blue) an affinity with black a brooding Northern blue for Goethe even Roman blue best seen in full moonlight (plenilunio) This placid space . . . not so blue as we thought. To be blue, There must be no questions. La terre est bleue comme une orange the earth not really blue though round as? though in shadow in the bowl the orange may turn blue There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Enter my blood-orange frame letting cobalt waves wash over you—give way to pleasure then give it away. What color is the universe? Between aquamarine and turquoise. When asked his favorite color he blurted out blue (as his shirt) hers, like Lorca's, will always be green green. NOTES Quotes from the following sources, sometimes edited or altered, in the order used: Mark Rothko, as quoted in Mark Rothko: A Biography, by James E. B. Breslin (The University of Chicago Press) James McBride, The Color of Water (Riverhead Books). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. Linda L. McAlister & Margarete Schättle (University of California Press). Tomaz Salamun, from "King of Birds," The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine Press). Czeslaw Milosz, "A little Treatise on Colors," Roadside Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A color manual for painters. "It Seems Art Is Indeed Monkey Business" by Sarah Boxer, The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997. Roger Fry, "Plastic Colour," from Transformations, 1926. Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter" (1908) in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (University of California Press). Le Corbusier. Goethe's Theory of Colours (1840), trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (MIT Press, 1970). Marianne Moore, from a letter in The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello (Alfred A. Knopf). Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions, trans. William O'Daly (Copper Canyon Press). Wallace Stevens, "The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract." Paul Eluard, "L'Amour, la Poésie." Frank O'Hara, "Why I Am Not a Painter." Neil deGrosse Tyson, "Colors of the Cosmos," in Natural History, March 2002.. > TOP |