^{after Etel Adnan}

And there, 
between clean walls
you assume 
the position,
angled toward 
the red squares 
roiling
on her canvases.

Into the oils 
of a new tense
she herself
days before 
had dissolved.

There, impasto:
her mountain.

Trimmed down 
to the first 
seeing.

Tamalpais 
at every pitch,
pistachio 
patches scraping
against cobalt.
Edges opaque
until they refused.

Mountainous,
she, too—
which is to say 
surfacing,
color latching 
to the seasons 
where meaning
rushes.

Of this transition
the living are given 
no access.                                                                

You, turning 
away from 
the dry wall,
where nothing
tears through.

A red square
appears in your days
yet you know
not yet where.

She will never return home. In their first meeting, he asks to touch her skin. To touch or to feel. He asks her to climb a ladder so that he may see her legs, whether a pig can walk through them. I imagine once she begins climbing the ladder, she cannot stop. If the 1906 earthquake had fallen a day later, he would have set sail across the ocean four years earlier and the matchmaker would not have called her name. Think of the particular light cast across her skin as she lifts her sleeve for him, as she ascends the ladder, perhaps gathering the hem of her dress in one hand. This light will take her from her country. She will have seven children in California. When she receives word of her mother’s death, she will climb on the roof and let down her hair. Her hair was a kind of ladder, pinned and smoothed, you would never find it. We look upon the ocean so easily from this distance. She lifted her sleeve, she climbed the ladder of her hair every morning. The particular light against her skin. A different ocean moved through her—her blood in my blood with his blood.