Color Wheel

Color Wheel

Golden brown
bounds in golden green,
tail flicking light, 
beans nodding
ever nearer autumn. 

I have been looking around,
asking of everything,
what color are you really?

Answers come
like a spinning wheel.
Brown turns
orange in the fields,
deepens maroon
in the grooves of trees.
Lichen bends
green then blue,
uncurls finally
in pink tongues. 

I lack the patience of a painter,
but even I can see
how the coming and going of light
tints the world,
tips the palette.

Even I can see that eyes
are too-narrow slits
for slotting
round reality.

Even I can feel
the turning wheel,
the slipping soil,
crisping soy
in the flagging light.

Soybean fields in all their color and glory

I know there were no begonias in my poem, but look how the light turns a bit of the petal into Dorothy’s ruby red slippers!

The Prompt

I truly have been asking what color are you really as I sit in the grass, sway in the swing, or stroll through soybeans and woods with Jeff (known simply as “golden brown” in the poem). It seems like a strange question to ask, perhaps, but it comes from a brilliant source: the English painter David Hockney.

Years ago, I saw an exhibition of his work in San Francisco. I remember it still—vividly colorful paintings as big as rooms. I felt like I was inside them. A few days ago, I watched this BBC documentary about Hockney’s work, entitled “The Art of Seeing.” Hockney said dozens of memorably mind-expanding things in the film, but the one that has stayed with me most is that simple question, which Hockney says he asks over and over, as he stares at a subject he intends to paint. What color are you really? Hockney says it takes a long time to really see what color something is and to understand that color in relationship to the other colors that surround it.

It takes time, and it’s worth the time. The longer I sit, asking this question, and looking deeply, the more colors I discover within the supposedly green grass or brown bark or white clouds. If you’d like a prompt to play with, I invite you to give this exercise a try. Sit (or stand) still for a few minutes. Give something a good hard look. Ask yourself what color it is really. Keep asking. Keep looking. Notice what happens.

Maybe nothing will happen. You will throw your hands up in the air, or shake a fist, declaring, “The grass is still just plain old green!”

Except, if that’s what happens, then something did happen after all. You shook a fist. Go write a poem about it!

Maybe you won’t shake a fist, though. Maybe instead, you’ll get distracted by your neighbor’s children, who are loudly playing in your vicinity. Something one of them says will remind you of your Great Aunt Melga, which will remind you of her horrid little dog, which will remind you of . . . and on and on and on. This is also just fine. I would love to read a poem about a person named Melga.

And then there’s another possibility . . . you might get really into this whole staring at colors thing! If you’re like me, the longer you look, the more you’ll see. And that might get you asking yourself questions about what else is possible if you pay a little more attention. Or it might have you wondering what all you’re missing in your hurry to do this or that. And any of that—the sitting still, the colors, the way they change, the way your eyes adjust, the experience of deep noticing, that old pattern of failing to deeply notice—any of that could be a starting place for a poem.

I am looking forward to whatever you’d like to share! I wish you rainbows of color, friends.