The Wild Iris
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Louise Gluck
Blue/violet and green, along with orange, make up the secondary palette. These colors arrived full force in my consciousness recently and have dominated my thinking and feeling for several weeks.
There is no way of knowing (that I am aware of) which colors will ride to the surface very suddenly and then settle in, making themselves completely at home. Then one day they disappear quite suddenly and are replaced by a new gaggle of clubby colors. This seduction cycles in and out, perpetually.
This poem by Gluck speaks to a number of important themes for me right now–the power of color, seasonality, cycles, nature’s version of trust.
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