Some days
I get up and
just want an excuse
to use the word
azure.

I used to know
someone who said she
was friend’s with me
from the time I said
my favorite color
was burnt sienna.
How could it not be?
with a name like that.

I am dancing around
the house to Kiko
and the lavendar moon,
a song I heard and
went right out to buy,
first for its sound
and sounds, and second
just for the idea
of a lavendar moon.

Although I am not much
a lavendar girl myself
in most ways that is,
lean more toward russet
colors like that.

Lately I have realized
I have got to let go
of the sense of failure
hanging over me
about things that aren’t
quite right. Or things
that are dangerously wrong.
Just a little more green,
I’ve said. Think of it
like that. An adjustment,
to get it just right.

I am very picky about color,
the yellow work table I used
to have took a dozen trips
to the paint store before
I found the one.
That was before the color
I wanted to call biscuit, feeling very apronly at
the time, trying to lure
that part of myself back.
Finally it became federal
blue, and then it left my
house and I could never
find it again.
Sometimes I think of it
that old steel re-inforced
but sagging all the same
thing $2 a a yard sale
so big we had to take the
double hung sash windows
apart to get it in the house.

The place where I first wrote
with real vigor. After it had
been a place to lay out patchwork,
and a place to make biscuits.

fJust a little more green
and it is precisely that,
that gasping feeling my soul
seems to always have that there
is not enough green here.

the thing is the right color
is the right color.
there is nothing to be done
about that. Nothing that
willl make a wrong color
right, not even lighting
nothing that will make
a right color not.
The problem is –
the way men would put it
“the trouble with you –
the trouble with me is
I don’t like to paint.
So I stall the search
I procrastinate as I seem
to do, why on earth is that?
As though I think I will
wake up and see the world
in a completely different
way, which does happen –
has been the pattern of my life.
But I still love the same colors
in it.

The old work table was the first thing
I ever painted blue, a can of paint my neighbor threw away. The only
blue I ever loved. A blue I was
always trying to match
After that serrendipty was my
favorite way to discover color –
someone should name some color
that – serrendiptiy.
A job I always wanted I thought
naming paints and roses.
After that blue –
what was on the mark down table
of the paint store was my favorite way.
It eliminated all that deliberation
over color chips.
That terrible disappointment
when I made a mistake.
sometimes I bought for the name,
though never without opening
the can.

I am quite the same over photos,
hostile when they give me that
yellowish green I hate in my trees.
My mother loved chartreuse
I hated her for that,
it was a color that made
me so unhappy then.
Though the chairs she bought
seemed stylish for her taste,
and pleased me that way,
as well as for their movable
base that let me turn
around and around,
constanatly changing my view.
You’d think you’d like
the word chartresuse,
but I never did.

I like to photograph
at the end of the day,
or in winter,
when the light is not
so bright, when the rain
provokes what little green
we get.
There is only place in
all the city I will allow
to develop my film.
I can be quite testy
over my colors,
but when the man standing
at the machine says
not so red, I am not
sure if that is it. A science I do not
aspire to in this life,
I just want a good green,
the one I love.
A little more red
a little more blue
I’m just lookin’
for it is true.

I’ve never been able
to love another green
more than the velvet I wore
as a little girl,
that rich dark green
I’ve always felt my
ancestors left,
sacrificed as I have said
in a careless urge to roam.
I donot even know where
it was, what country they
left. But I know it is
there by how how true that
green is to me.

I need a little more gren

After a bad weekend
when I sit and cry
and say I don’t know
what to do.
shall I leave you,
or sell the house.
I need a little more
green.
I lounge on the sofa
and talk all afternoon
on the phone
like a teenager
to my friend I have known
since then.
I can’t remember the
metaphor now,
but it was something
about brown,
the necessity now
to move only toward
what is true
I wish I could remember
now how I put it,
it led me to say
it’s not brown to substitue the word brown
for the word true.
I’ve been in a brown phase
lately. Though I am
mostly green. And then
I had a cycle of gold,
I think as my hair turned silver.
Lately I am very attracted
to brown, rich browns
with a lot of light
to them. Hinting at russet.
I always liked colors
transparent like coca cola
where color depends upon
movement and light,
the way I always saw my hair.

I think it was lossing that
guidepost perhpas that made
me accept the color of these
trees. I can’t say it is that
I felt I was losing color,
and had to place myself in
a duller landscape. I don’t
think about things that way,
but I always use my body
as a yardstick,
rhe way the ancinets did.

Lately I’m sick and tired
of people’s comments about my
hair. I consider it nobody’s
business. And have decided
the next dyed red thing that
comments will get my truth
unvarnished. Then she will
know my red’s still there,
not just the few strands
that shine in my bathroom
mirror, the ones that matter.
Red hair is a state of mind,
I have always had it.

You’ve got to learn to hide
your colors the one boss
I ever liked told me.
But I never did and spend
my time instead trying to
unearth them,
changing parts, pulling my
hair up, looking for jewlery
that caught the gold flecks
in my eyes.
It was good advice in a way, a self-protection I always needed
and never had,

If you offered me a shade of blue
would I return it sayin that
it was too dark or light,
or would I see for the precious
thing that it might one day be,
hold on to me.
lines from a song I have to listen
to over and over, you know
cause of this azure thing.

when I said green girl was nobody’s
dream girl it was a sad thing to say.

women with a hint of red in their
hair, in dark green velvet dresses
a flush to their complexion,
women named Caitlin perhaps,
women whose hair blows in the wind,
who do not hide their colors
nor reveal them to easily,
because not everyone can provoke
them.
Who live in the green where
their only true love lives.

I need a little more green.
No, I need a green that is completely
different. A green that is very green,
that is very dark, and deep
transparent when the light hits
so you can tell where it is gold
what is its brown.

I always liked the

she was looking
for a trance
she was looking for a trance
she was looking for a trance

I was looking
for a way out of one.

10/17/99 -1