MY HANDS, DYED WOAD

My hands, dyed woad from today’s art
would be the same equation as darkness.
I am mesmerized by color, traffic lights amaze me,
the green but not really green, it’s teal blue,
the color of epaulets on wild ducks
and the red verging on magenta,
veneous blood from the inside of the wrist.
And the yellow of the sun trapped behind glass.

These colors we use to invoke all other colors,
to call them forth. Light, prisms,
the edge of a broken bottle behind the hospital
casting rainbows on the far wall.


3/12/04

BLOOMSDAY BLUE

Thalatta, thalatta, the sea, the sea…

& Ulysses asleep, as I write with a pen, blue as thalassa. 

Thalatta, old sea, thalassa, new sea, both wine-dark. 

A drunken boat rocking, rocking, that slap and thunk.

As if a fist against a slab of meat… Industrious measuring, 

the blue eye on the prow plumbing the depths for signs of danger, for luck…

it’s all the same thing in the end. What sailors, what shore?

I write with a blue disco pen shedding blue light, 

a gift so beautiful I can hardly bear to write with it, 

I can barely contain myself. Homer was blind. 

What would purlblind Joyce have done with this distraction? 

The novelty of a pen lighting my words in the darkness…

I can’t wait to turn off the lights and see if my words, 

written in darkness, in knower’s ink, 

shed a different light when written thusly, 

will I find new metaphors at the end of the sentence?

And her lost sandal greeting the lip of Venus in the rosy-fingered dawn…

My hands, dyed woad from today’s art 

would be the same equation as darkness. 

I am mesmerized by color, traffic light amaze me, 

the green but not really green, teal blue, 

the color of epaulets of wild ducks 

and the red verging on magenta, 

venous blood from the inside of the wrist. 

And the yellow of the sun trapped behind glass.

These colors we use to invoke all other colors, 

to call them forth. Light, prisms, 

the edge of a broken bottle behind the hospital 

casting rainbows on the far wall.

Newton was right, light so amazing 

that he theosophized eloquent and the poets, 

when the saw what was possible, 

abandoned their dreary palette of words, 

drab browns and greys, and invoked color, 

pure prismatic color in their verse, 

liberating it from the mundane 

so that I may write this nonsense 

about the sea, the sea, 

all that blue uinleashed in this pen, 

it was a business gift from

one Japanese business man 

to another, to curry favor…

And Ulysses still sailing home 

heroically after all these years, 

Stephen Daedalus trading in his oars 

for tt’s taken from thalatta, for thalassa, 

having arrived in the 21st century 

a hundred years hence, the sea, 

Demotic Greek, the Olympiads 

returning home to Athens in time for the Games. 

Sea, sea and sky are one thing on the horizon. 

Look how Bloomsday approaches 

at the speed of sight.

3/12/04

(I know this says March but I suspect it was written in June, Bloomsday. Rescuing old bit of writing —1/2/2014)