Foremost of all the colors, I admire
red: great red
native of blood’s country, poetic, palpable, fetching
and deadly — red that screams, that tastes familiarly
exotic, that hurries;
next, green, in veins of stone,
bewildering, seethes: of cornucopia and vistas:
reliable (and glad… and true), but also bespeaking
want and nausea;
imagination’s blue, unfathomable,
pre-lingual hue of potential, the primary erasure,
playing… awaits;
floundering yellow, that grins
thinly and is pitied: cheerful but panicky, garish
then: follows;
thick purple, removed and advantaged —
perpetually luscious – imperial tint of checked breath —
unreal, upstanding — presents itself;
elaborate pink,
shy but friendly; brown, rich and grave and common;
particular shades like rust or lemon or aquamarine
that parade by reminding me of friends and clothing
and weaponry;
and black and white tremendous,
restored and reinvented with compounded interest:
all these I love and use, before
I admit any orange:
neglected child: off-handedly I tug its carrot head
above ground; careless, obstruct its hydrant body;
we all do; everyone hates it; the color has few kinfolk;
unrhymable: in poems we depict the sun as red or gold;
fire as yellow, red, or even blue; and hair as red;
we allow it, absent of mythology, only one holiday:
Halloween: appropriating pumpkin orange to ward
Death from our houses;
we dub it the color of safety
because we all love danger;
statistics having proven
it does not sell, we ban it from our advertisements:
and we fear it, too, because it is finally only itself
(an orange fruit by any other name is still a kind
of orange);
but that is why we require orange, a self-
sufficient antidote for pretentious variegation —
it tells the truth — simply;
so let us now pronounce
the humility of its blooms; exult in the short season
of orange leaves; and recommend the eternal sweetness
of the color with one flavor:
let us now praise orange,
the opposite of all the other colors, the most heroic
because it withstands interpretation;
because it will not
sit still for us to photograph it or give up its secrets;
because we have abandoned it; and because it both
inspires and defies these terms that attempt to define it.
