Color Theory

Before Newton used a prism to break light
into color, Aristotle said everything was white

and black. What could be simpler? The air—
white. Water—white. Black was the color

of transformation, everything’s bright or dusky
hue based on its state of change. Just look—

trees cast in different shades by the gold of fire
or shelves of changing light at sunset. And look

at plants, he said, who change into their green
clothes so quickly in front of the sun, but dig

an inch into the black soil, and there, naked,
the grass beginning as a shy whiteness rooting

through the dark. I don’t know what this means
for the narcissus, though it does explain why

the asphodel grows wild in the underworld.
Perhaps the snowdrops are light we can touch,

like porcelain, like egret feathers, like walls
of ancient tombs. Black is heat, is health,

Aristotle said. Watch how the black horse runs.
Behold how long the black dog lives, warming

your feet at night. Even before Newton named
indigo, every lover knew the puddle of shadow

they stand in to wait for the night. Even before
Aristotle said everything begins as black or white,

every lover knew that was both wrong and true—
in your arms I can see nothing beyond the white

of your beloved eye, the black eternity
of your pupil as it swallows a pearl of moonlight.

The Dream Temple of Asclepius

I never know in the beginning if I’m wrestling
an angel or a python. Both have their camouflage
and their fetish for revenge. I dream in Technicolor,
but the snake’s skeleton is still white. Even though
something is dead doesn’t mean it isn’t still dangerous.
Just ask my mother’s ghost. In last night’s dream,
she told me Socrates washed himself before drinking
the hemlock to spare people the trouble of cleaning
his body after he died. He didn’t want to be a burden,
she said, as she rinsed shampoo from my hair.
Inside my ribs, a candle stuttered as wind slipped
through. Inside the Greek temple of Asclepius,
a person could dream their cure. A tour guide
said so but wouldn’t let me nap between the pillars.
I could only study the cold architecture that held
no medicine for me. In my hotel, I tried to dream
of Asclepius and pet the snake on his staff,
but even with a whole franchise of nights, the flowers
bent and rephased the wind into prescriptions
for someone else’s suffering. I lied earlier
when I said I didn’t know if I wrestled a python
or an angel. It’s always my mother’s ghost pinning me
to the dream until I say, I don’t want to be a burden
and lift her broken rib to my chest like a scalpel.

Extraction of the Stone of Madness as Alt-Text

—after Hieronymus Bosch

[The healer holds his scalpel like a pen. The patient leans back, his white shirt still clean and untouched by his weeping scalp. Onlookers watch with an opiate calm. There’s no early sign of his ruinous mind, the geologic infection that makes the patient rave: Master, rid me of this stone. Is this all it is? Is the death drive in me a tumor of earth trying to return to itself? My hands root into my pockets, trying to disappear into the looking. The patient stares back at me, a mirror of oil on wood. What rises from the red seed of his wound is a swamp tulip, a water lily, a busty blossom sensitive to light. Master, I have been waiting all night to tell you—I trust myself but still hide the knife. It is the wrong season for my stone, but I feel the darkness circling. Beyond the bleeding patient, the countryside’s absinthe green glow. Beyond the fields, pale cities, the vanishing point, and then the vanishing.]

Wings of the Triptych as Alt-Text

—after Jan Gossaert (Mabuse)’s The Donors

[The hands of the man are swollen at the joints. Flexion contractures. Left hand against the body. Right hand on a psalter. Fingers crooked. Wrong. His pain is not my pain. It is 16th century and Flemish. I am neither, though I have also stood for a painter and let my joints go stone. He is dressed in layers for weather and wealth, but like any good classical muse, I always left one breast out to prove my virtue. Virgin and Child sit at the center, but in the left wing the man stares back at the artist, hands gnarled and honest. A manual rhetoric of suffering. I used to spread my fingers and make painters render the negative space between knuckles—delicate triangles of shadow like Michaelangelo’s Adam, his left wrist limping away from God’s touch. This was after I learned how to stay still and disown my body, let the pain become a soft humming as I studied the studio windows and watched the sky become a garden. Plato thought the soul was a circle. Yes, something in me is longer than the sun. I wrote this with both of my hands.]

Autoerotics as Alt-Text

—after The Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens

[She wants to try the old cures, follows the rumors of the fountains, and abandons her dress to the arms of the trees. She weds herself to desire and bathes in it. Pleasure thickens in her like fruit in summer. But no, the three of them are dancers swollen with ichor and a spring that runs between their fingers like a sweet and gentle flood. They gaze, they graze, they pull pearls from each other’s hair. Her body will hurt for days, as it often does. Today, she wants herself as a lover, to be energy and myth, more spirit than flesh, the consented desire unsolicited as the first offer. She only wants to be a scholar of pleasure, a student of her own healing. But her wrists are stubborn, too swollen to finish. Hips, a pain library. The gentle pressure of the light caressing her skin—gospeling, devout, amending the erasure of tomorrow.]

Portrait Gallery as Alt-Text

[Hands behind the reclining nude. Hands abstracted into lines. The body of a child obscuring one. So many portraits collarbone and up, avoiding the intricate mess of fingers. In the photograph, Renoir’s knuckles like grapes, a mirror of what I could be without medicine. I miss the music I used to clumsily make. I miss the soft loops of crochet and the fleshy press of dough. Now my hands and hips are mentored by pain’s curriculum of time + wound + the Sisyphean grunt of it all. Missing: Leda’s hands lost in the swan’s wing, but David’s hands on the harp. His fingers, swollen as strawberries in August, hold a bonfire of music beneath his hands—a somatic faith. I want to watch starlings unbraid themselves in the ribs of clouds. I want music to coerce me into a tenderness as fragile and temporary as the shadows of flowers. I want to tie paint brushes to my hands like Renoir, to paint the fire before it enters my fingers, make a museum of all the joys I’ve held. I want to hold David’s hands, to paint mine pink as last year’s valentines and pull his fingers from the harp strings, fold them over mine. Pray for me. Pray with me. May some part of my body still know how to hallelujah.]