NICHTALALLOUDI, II

• NICHTALALLOUDI, II
•       —for Gail Armand

The thoughts of night were imprisoned somewhere
between that humid blue of distant summer skies,
chinaware, and the foreboding secrets of midnight
locked in deep pools where fragments of sleep
drifted amid vórtices scattered with violet-scented stars.
Last night, the rooster murdered sleep. Again.
A thief of time, for sure, but the waning moon was being coy.
Bleary folds of cerise seep into the cornea of the eye
as if to guide the dawn into an orchestra of light
where the green meadow is lit as if from within,
perhaps a rainy promise, bolsters its courage.
The wild azaleas are late this year, the bees, bereft.
The sky is roiling, overcast with certain gloom,
and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future.
There’s an old Irish saying, What was the color of the wind
on the day of your birth? I don’t know, perhaps
an unspecified pale eastern wind verging on lapis
streaked with silver and indigo with flecks of amber.
Or the heliotrope following the sun. But it has made me restless
and it is a psalm growing darker yet, howling at the door.
To the bee, the wind is always the color of pollen,
to the wolf, dark-fingered shadows on the edge of the forest.
What is the compass point of happiness or joy?
There’ll be time enough for daydreaming
when the danse macabre ushers us
into the secret bosom of the earth.

4/19/20

First draft

Last night, my thoughts were locked
somewhere between China blue and midnight.
Magenta guided the morning into daylight
where green is lit as if from within,
but the sky is overcast. And likely to remain so.
There’s an Irish saying, What was the color of the wind
on the day of your birth? I don’t know,
but it made me restless as the night.

Susan Wooldridge once gave us a word assignment, and my word was theoretically from the Greek, night-blooming flowers, perhaps jasmine, perhaps cereus, or NICHTALALLOUDI  which resurfaced here. Of course I can’t find it on the internet, ergo, it is now a quasi made-up word.

The Irish saying is from The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien, who got it from “a 10th-century Middle-Irish poetry, Saltair na Rann, ... which describes a 12-point wheel of wind colours: a cosmic-cum-meteorological map of Ireland.” — Irish Times