The Color of My Sadness

Not blue.  Never blue.  

I don’t care what Elvis thought about Hawaii

or what kind of Christmas it will be without you.

Blue is not sad or depressed or blue.

Blue is happy, sky, azure, eternal seas,

baby boys, forever in blue jeans.

I love blue, and I refuse to hand it over to sadness.

 

You can’t have brown either.  

Brown is the earth.

Brown is suntan, coppertone, 

beach babies drinking brown beer 

on a brown blanket 

delivered by a UPS truck.

Back away from the brown.

 

And you can’t have yellow.  Duh.

 

Red is out.  I need it for passion.

And righteous indignation. 

 

Green?  Not on your life.  

It is the smell of freshly mown grass, 

the sound of the breeze blowing 

through Mother Nature’s hair,

the taste of a slightly tart margarita.

 

If you want to own my sadness,

then I suppose you’ll have to take

whatever color the sun becomes 

in those last seconds before she falls 

into the coin slot of the horizon.

Take the thousands of

red-orange-purple-mauve-fuchsias

that melt into each other

and shift and change each other

every few milliseconds 

into one more sunset seen 

for the first time anywhere,

just like that one I saw 

the night you left,

when my tears made a

kaleidoscope of color

out of the western sky

and welled to honor

the last of the light,

the farewell to the 

Bringer of 

Life. 

 

Whatever color is sent on

the last ray from the sun

at day’s end,

that is the color of sadness.

That one you can have. 

100 Novels

100 novels live inside me.

Some I write as poems because I get bored quickly.

Some have a natural hook and a dance beat. They become songs.

A few bloom into a full plot, character sketches, random baubles of backstory.

 

I finished two.

One lives in a black hole in cyberspace.

The other lives in my memory and on a five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disk.

Both corrupted storage media.

 

Sometimes, rarely, a novel will arrive in a sense of fullness,

a complete glorious narrative waiting for the telling.

And there it recluses, known only in the flash of my firefly attention.

 

But what a concept.

What an ending.

 

Absorption

Grief is a separate class of emotion.

No, it’s a bundle of many emotions

all vying for attention,

sometimes at the same time

and sometimes at different times.

Grief is a new layer of skin.

For awhile, it’s the surface layer.

Over time, it works its way into our being,

no longer the layer closest to the nerve endings,

but a new part of who we are in the world.

If we absorb it fully,

the pain, anger, denial, and sorrow transform

into reminiscence,

gratitude,

and a sweet sadness

that comforts a bit more

than it hurts.

The Spring Sun is Different

The spring sun is different from the summer sun.

The sun in summer is omnipotent, omnipresent.

There is no escape from the relentless oven of the summer sun.

It WILL find you. It WILL burn you.  It WILL roast you.

A July sun in Tennessee is like being wrapped in a wool blanket

over a turtleneck in a sweat lodge.

 

The spring sun is different from the fall sun.

October evenings the sun is waving goodbye

from a place in the sky that seems farther away.

It is the recessing sun, the melancholy light of days gone by.

Its passing is honored by the momentary capture of its essence in a backyard fire pit

on a jacket night, under moons full or waxing or most likely waning.

The fall sun sits on the flatlands of West Tennessee and

sizzles its final goodbye as it sinks into the Father of Waters.

 

The spring sun is different from the winter sun.

January can be so dreary and damp.

The winter sun is often absent entirely.

They say it’s still up there, beaming as always behind a thick cover of clouds,

but I don’t always believe it.

It’s a good thing the red and green of Christmas happens in winter,

otherwise a Tennessee yule would be nothing but grey.

 

The spring sun beckons like an invitation.

It doesn’t burn; it warms.   It doesn’t kill; it enlivens.

The spring sun has a different light altogether,

one that brings promise and joy and flowers.

We are reminded that life goes on.

We are reminded that we go on.

The spring sun is different.