Does the color mean something?

Leaching from your eyes, now copper, now coffee grains of day

turning amber

once you were green fields, swaying new corn

budding beneath yoking sun

remember? When movement was an oiled limbering dance?

And turning to a lover, you wilted in their gaze

heat climbing your throat like a jeweled snake

you were immeasurable, lost in the bosom of a flower’s center.

They don’t watch you now, with those piercing turns

they don’t see you anymore, they eat themselves blank

eyes like dried raisins, hearts ever darkened

you set sail on Conrad’s* doomed boat and never embarked

losing yourself in the ebony solace of pressed night

where paper-thin hands and failing eyesight becomes drowned

by the murmur of the sea – spreading her vowels

like Saties’ Gymnopedie III. Lente et grave

or the gentle turn of Velvet Underground’s vinyl

poised in sonorous Nico’s chocolate onyx tongue.

Would you stay faithful to me if you saw how

I looked, rubbing cream beneath my intonated shadows

lifting flat breasts to the light, scolding antinociceptive thighs

for their disobedience, nettling the sonant marks of

life into splayed mosaic? Would you choose me over

the nymphette, the orator, the crowded room

sweating years like a viola woman chased by her hunger?

It snowed that day, your scarlet blood became my pigment

I saw it in the shroud of moon, the furl of branch weighted

with ice.

Does the color mean something?

Or do we shadow our souls, yearning in crushed dates

and papered roses until you, standing

on the opposite side of the tracks, biding

to board a train in different direction, wave

madly and without limit

your burgundy lips broken in great grin

calling my name over smoke and belch

of cresting metal and vapored chess carriages

delight blooming on your urgent face

just like it did when I said as children

I dare you

and together, we jumped.

*Josef Conrad / Heart of Darkness (a novel).