very strong february
A man and a woman pretend to be white ice Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February A week or two left on distracting black trees Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again. Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the chair Or part of the sum of what big white families think up To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological company. At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm anyway Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow. This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is actually In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said something yesterday To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and white tomorrow Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall tonight.
Bernadette Mayer