Green Means Literally a Thousand Things or More

So concludes an essay on “Fern Hill,” in which the student seems

somewhere between jazzed up & pissed off that green might mean

so many things from one stanza to the next: here, a blooming

Eden proxy; here, rot made by the grip of time. For starters. Or

that sun-slaked field, not far from our classroom, as lush-green

as any Welsh farmyard, greyed overnight with frost. Emerald

beer bottle hurled from a car. The slack-jawed lime-green

goblin face spanning a front porch post-Halloween

for so many weeks it looks like it’s here to stay. The long-ago

brown-green of Cleveland, where it rained always & without pity

upon a past I crave despite myself & our team lost always 14—2.

Every time we waited in the bleachers for the game to resume,

my father would look down upon the outfield’s diagonal lines

& proclaim Still a lot of green out there, meaning anything

can happen & will. Have you ever heard in a crowd the saddest part

of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” where everyone lies & pretends

we don’t care if we ever get back & makes the last word echo

twice more? We always want to get back, whether or not

we’re hailing childhood green. Like the student in her essay,

I too could keep rattling off images of spring & decay—June

sunset horizon flash, summer hair stained olive from churning

over-chlorinated pools, green shadow of a hand somewhere

that makes it feel as if owls were bearing everything away—

instead of looking again at the image online I glimpsed before

returning to the still-ungraded hay-high stack of student work. 

Maybe you saw it too? Maybe you also had the spellbound luck

of wandering to other tasks instead of asking what it means to know

anything can happen in a wholly different way, instead of looking 

once more at the slash of police tape that is the only horizon

that matters just now for the two men in the photograph who sit

together on the curb, faces glowing blue-red in the lights, both of them

bleary-eyed but alive, swaddled in aftermath & a blanket that is green,

a detail that couldn’t matter less, given how the numbers of the dead

still rise. Here we are again, as inevitable as the clock’s tick, looking in

at a place that now will never be young. Is there a way to say it—

There’s been a shooting—that will allow it to be heard, remembered

& heard without the easy glide of our past tense? That will stop us

from wanting to turn to anything under the wide starry sky that is not

the green fire burning in the minds of those men or the green

of a blanket America provides & provides without change?