The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 3/15/08

[BlueIris]

"Green"

and already the leaves have arrived,
my doctor, that blur of green you spoke of four years ago
thickened while you sat, spread in your chair in the sun,
children scuffing bicycles down the alley to the grocery store.
it was not really green, you said, but rather
a haze of green, a fog of green,
a thought of green you could only call light.

I awoke from a dream panicked
thinking I'd missed the arrival of the leaves.
a landlady was taking me from room to room,
each one barren and small and filled
with the sound of typewriters. there was a view
of a beach in the distance, the encroachment of a wave
like a finger, spray hitting the empty shore,
a foreign beach the color of dust.
the trees were black arms holding up the sky,
crookedly. along the sidewalk in front of the building
that fine mist, that vague rain of green had gone,
and the branches were bent with a new burden of leaves.

four years ago we had word-associated this thought of yours,
this green that wasn't there,
back when mysteries were still abundant
and could be uncovered. yesterday, everything was plain
and unbudging as a jug sitting in the sun.
the beach was the cover of your shirt, sand,
the color of your face new to the sand.

in the morning there was no way of telling
if the leaves had come, since there were only buildings,
every room a bleak room. the phone rang loudly
while you, my doctor, went hunting in the park for the hint
of green, the cloud of green you'd held in your mind
for four years, the green that was still mysterious
and therefore solvable, the green that failed to exist.
it breathed along the backs of your thick, white hands
as the phone rang in my chest
without a sound, and you groped further and further
down the beach with the voice of the sands.

—Evelyn Lau

[BlueIris]

1. Lau wrote of this poem in "The Best American Poetry 1992":

"'Green' was written as part of a series of poems about therapy. I was nineteen and ready to leave the psychiatrist I had been seeing for four years. He had once talked about the emergence of leaves in the spring and how he was never able to capture the exact moment before they came out entirely—the moment when they were just shadows in the trees, the faintest trace of color among the branches. This seemed to me a lot like poetry—that struggle to capture a moment on paper, to keep it and hold onto it before it becomes something else. I think 'Green' expressed the wistfulness I felt at termination, and the awareness that we would continue in our separate professions to try to nail down the equivalent of that moment between the bare branches and the beginning of another season."

[RetroLounge]

2. Wow...

that is nice and powerful...

:hi:

RL

[BlueIris]

3. Thanks! I thought we'd go back to nice and powerful since scary and powerful

wasn't generating any comments.

Don't worry, Retro, April (National Poetry Month, natch) is gonna bring a resurgence of knock-you-on-your butt poems. In case you were, you know, worried.

[BlueIris]

4. Kick.

[BlueIris]

5. Kick.

[BlueIris]

6. Kick.