A Palette
Azure lobelia props up the heart
that extra hair’s breadth happiness is.
___
The brown-hooded sparrow alights on a sprig
which bounces, as though on the soul’s trampoline.
___
Chicory blue diffused like sky.
The Romans thought it barbaric.
___
Death’s soot at the cypress’s top –
where the crow slows, and builds its nest.
___
The eye’s dome inside the locust:
the lime-green golden glow ascends.
___
Finches inch their way up a branch,
blushing at being so subtle?
___
Grey ashes, containing lashes,
in a tin can is his father.
___
Honest work makes itself known,
somehow. This too is a hue.
___
Iodine is evening’s aching
for an elusive perfection.
___
Jasmine wafting. That sweetest shade of heaven
on earth, August 8th, 2011.
___
Khaki seeks to keep the peace
as a kind of camouflage.
___
Lavender leaves are not lavender.
And then the spike of its pistil climbs.
___
Minium isn’t mahogany;
majolica blue is not maroon.
___
Nothing occurs in the way of colour for N.
Is there a colour of Nothing?
___
O, oleander, how many years
have I been writing this pure-white poem?
___
Pelargonium’s flesh-white sex
streaked with pink in the soft dawn light.
___
A quince stinks much less than guava,
and keeps the alphabet alive.
___
Rust reduces iron to dust;
over time instead trust litheness.
___
Sepia tilts the actual into
the light of a slightly milder notion.
___
Truth is clear, as tea: visible only
there in the tincture that looking bequeaths.
___
Umber always hovers under
the red of whatever gets said.
___
Verdigris takes on a value
that’s only understood with time.
___
Wheat rekindles the spectrum of ... what? Wheat.
Imbibing light from every direction.
___
X is always Albers’s variable
dynamic of ambient pigmentation.
___
Yellow stresses the Jew’s encounter
with what the world has put on his plate.
___
Zaffer’s not saffron – it’s cobalt,
circling back to the azure start.
American poet Peter Cole’s most recent volume of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled; a new collection, The Invention of Influence, is forthcoming (both from New Directions). His translations include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale). Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.