COLOR-WHEEL POEM

Someone posts a color wheel with the ascendant color yellow representing joy, the oranges and reds representing shades of fear and anger, with magenta, purple and royal blue, representing darker thoughts, emerging towards the hopeful blues and greens. Then she asked what color were our thoughts when we awoke. And what color now? But I couldn’t choose between the colors I loved, and the assigned emotions—I couldn’t get past the metaphor.

I said: Yes, I awoke twice during the night but I would have trouble choosing a color as I tend to choose the colors I love, on the left and bottom of the color wheel—and I don’t associate those assigned dark feelings with that particular color wheel.

I love magenta, it gives me inexplicable joy, and I  am mad for purple, and royal blue—especially the intersection of indigo and violet. These are the colors I tend to wear. They make me happy. They’re bold. I don’t associate dark thoughts with them. I love cyan and green (just not on  me).

Yellow is a color I really dislike along with light green. In my family lime green, triggers migraines. And I am so not fond of any of the orange colors, or red either—except in small doses. I have such a visceral response to color that I can barely enter a Safeway because the predominant colors are yellow and red. It upsets me to no end to be surrounded by those colors. To me yellow is aggression, not joy. It whines. I have trouble concentrating. I also may have a touch of synesthesia. I am not talking about being in the desert and surrounded by sandstone walls that’s different, besides they verge on purple. Purple is not depression, it’s the color of forgiveness, perhaps resurrection.

How we feel about color is subjective, in my case, violently so, visceral, and a singular paradigm won’t work. At least not for me.

I’ll take the entire skewed lower half of the wheel beginning with magenta to green, please.

COLOR-WHEEL POEM

Magenta is a full body hug, passion,
the embers of the soul.
Purple is secretive thoughts and creativity,
the night dreaming.
Royal blue is twilight and goatskin—
sorry, Neruda, poetry defines me.
Delft, or China is blue deep water, emotions,
Monet’s water lilies come to mind.
Cyan is the sky daydreaming of clouds and prisms.
Green is spring’s eternal promise,
the buckeye opening its hands in supplication.

4/19/20



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.

4/19/20

But the good news, another poem came from it. I think. Which, at this point, is a separate poem.

• NICHTALALLOUDI, II

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