This color was never stirred in a can.
It’s like the underside of God’s tongue.
The very thought of reproducing it
is like saying, I want this room
done in that woman’s laugh
after a joke that was only mildly funny
but you love the person who told it
and the one who laughed equally.
No, not remotely salmon; not sienna.
Not melon, I don’t care what stage
of ripeness. Tincture of fresh clay,
of linden tea plus one drop of clover honey?
No. It’s more like the glowy heart
in the opening credits of I Love Lucy—
which was filmed in black and white
so you have to guess at its hue.
But that’s the color it would have been.
It’s like the imagined defying the real
in an unusually confrontational way.
Once you’ve seen it a kind of zen
descends like a cape over your shoulders.
You won’t always be trying to impress people.
I can’t believe how long you’ve lived here
without seeing it, though it lasts only
a few seconds every day about this time.
I saw it the very first night I moved here.
Stand over there, look toward the city
but only peripherally. This way,
don’t face it full-on; turn slightly left,
there, breathe shallowly. Look up
without tipping your head back. Now
you’re too tense, you’re not trying, no,
the light has changed it’s gone.

7. Letters arrived in intervals, as with everything else one might come, one might not regardless of whether there’d been a response. We prepared at all times. Bent over. We dreamed things would be different. Every time the door opened we each smiled in a way to make clear we’d never seen our own face. 

8. An appendix washed up, pages current-smoothed, leaning funny. We stood and watched the skin stretched and sewn. The so-called imaginary, so-called interior, so-called paradoxical private sphere. 

13. Dailiness was the anxiety through which we waited. Buttons undone, like clearance. Not what we wanted but what we didn’t know we had to have. Private acts to attempt in public. Productive relationships to sites of violence. Lace-fronts. A dollar to run to the store. 

19. However useful, the language was degrading, incompatible and lacked necessary verbs. The ability to compress, overflow and alter the landscape through a low swollen hum. To smell strongly in the morning, at the grocery or over the phone. 

24. There were moments we were incapable of decision. An opening through which to register an image pungent through its own material law. A body pulled inward, door unlocked. Irresponsible to. That this moment would return. Return us. That this, and only this, would be the day.