strawberrytaeger

but there was a time once

strawberrytaeger

II
          
          nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows
          in unexpected colors. after noticing green cypresses do drop red
          shadows, goethe chastised them. “the eye demands
          completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”
          he tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies
          to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.
           
          over and over again wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence.
          why is there no clear white?
          he wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses,
          but all he finds is mist.
           
          at first i felt as if the baby had fallen away
          like a blue shadow on the snow.
           
          then i felt like i killed the baby
          in the way you can be thinking about something else
          and drop a heavy platter by mistake.
           
          sometimes i feel like i was stupid
          to have thought i was pregnant at all.

strawberrytaeger

once when i went into those woods i saw a single hot pink orchid
            on the hillside and i had to keep reminding myself not to
            tell the baby about the beautiful small things i was seeing.
            so, hot pink has been here forever and i don’t even care
            about that color or how andy warhol showed me an orchid.
            i hate pink. it makes my eyes burn.
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strawberrytaeger

I
          
          i want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name,
          because i don’t want anything to look the way it did before.
           
          van gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded
          and curators labeled the work “white roses” by mistake.
           
          the world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol.
          when i learned the word i was newly pregnant
          and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches.
          the pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green
          and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable
          words. the vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger
          dipped in sugar pleased me then. i said the word aloud
          for the baby to hear. chlorol. i imagined the baby 
          could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe,
          but if you can see what i’m seeing, the word for it
          is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.

strawberrytaeger

i sat there, thinking back across that long hard winter to the awful day i'd left the company. to walking with lockwood trough the park as he tried to talk me out of it; to our final dreadful conversation in a café while three successive cups of tea grew cold; to how – growing angry with me at the last – he'd left me there.