Can you see the colour you are listening to?
Shoots of static seek shelter from the burgeoning earth. The frost is cracking, crunching, clutching. This is the risk the plant takes: to rise, to spill forth, to extend a fair leaf to the sun, early as it may yet be – the brief-being as opposed to the not-being. As the leaves turn from litter to mulch, one colour gives way to the next, chemical compounds conquering the inert.
The film reel begins to sputter like unintended consequence. So much contained in this missive, so many passions fallen short. Could such feelings ever be revived? or would disappointment wrap them into an angrier ancestor, a vestigial remnant of coarser emotion? In matters of the heart, who can predict the prevailing chamber?
As the plane descends, much remains unclear: the fog on the runway, the mirror dimly, the clouded thought. As a child, she gravitated toward bright colors, made designations based on category and shade. But the shrouded, the luminal, the in-between – no one had prepared her for this. And now the wheels are touching down. The tarmac extends into the unseen.
Whirls, knocks, drum rolls: movement is in the air. Insects buzz around the cello, its grain sustained by varnish and rag. Pieced together by wood from the family farm, its form is imperfect, its resonance divine. The stick cries out to the bow, have they captured you too? But the bow only smiles, pliable, content to be drawn, rather than to strike.
No, she insists, clutching the side of her bed, seeming to stare through bandaged eyes. Never speak his name again. Instead, tell me of the sea. How is she this day, reticent or bold? Does she swirl and foam, does she rest and recede, does she rise up and retreat? The water in my body cries out to hers. We take what is given. We wash and abrade. We smooth and we destroy.
Richard Allen
a closer listen 