After Rothko’s Green Blue Green (1969)
BY BLU MEHARI
At the airport baggage claim, my father and I
Fundamentally disagree as to the nature of teal.
I propose some fish fins and bird’s eggs,
Cyanobacteria as well as sections of the ocean,
But mostly it is a stunning lie to say
The sea’s any color, but anemic and blue.
Certain inks, peacocks in places
Around the eye and plumage, auroras, apatites
Damselflies, a shocking number of beetles
Who are then pulverized for dye,
Icebergs, as their layers separate light,
And sometimes living green animals
Tint glacial bodies before they melt
Into puny water. Some markings on flags or maybe
Exclusively the rectangle on Sri Lanka’s, I’m not sure.
The alternate uniform of the Anaheim Ducks
Because the word teal comes from a breed
Of ducks. (Linnaeus remarks on the bright
Patches on their wings.) They are unlikely
To go extinct, but who knows? Medical scrubs,
Indonesian passports, a few ocean paintings,
And that Rothko I know you’d loathe
To see it where it hangs somewhere in low light
Bare paint while it goes on all ten
Million dollars of it according to Sotheby’s
And cut through with an ultramarine stripe anyway.
He responds with the thin blankets that sometimes sheath
The faces of corpses and a burlap shawl
My grandmother wore, embroidered with gold leaves.
I offer a kind of hornworm while hauling
My suitcase (green) from the carousel
And he gives the outline of a boyhood mountain
On his Amharic copy of Robinson Crusoe.
I say I never knew you paid so much attention.
He says I named you for a color.
“[RESORT OPERATOR] STILL BELIEVED IN LOVE AS MOUNT ST. HELENS ERUPTION LOOMED, REFUSED TO LEAVE THE MOUNTAIN THAT GAVE HIM EVERYTHING”
—Douglas Perry, The Oregonian
BY BLU MEHARI
Not even the fruit erupting from the grass,
The elk flocking to those tiny red pinpricks
Could thaw me. All April, Saint Helens seized,
Like a sheet ruptured in the wash, the brutal
Function of a shrouded, gray muscle
Agitating under the flashlight.
It is a clean thrill to know your future.
Last Tuesday morning, President Carter
Asserted catastrophe over the radio.
I trampled the splitting granite ridges, displayed
My commitment in footsteps and sighs.
How easy to choose the mountain’s swollen veins
Bulging into the concluded sky.
The geologists say it’ll shear her a thousand feet
Shorter, her cough blanketing Bronco sunroofs
As far as Edmonton, but the smoke will draw
Fitter hemlock to this dirt and then
What will be born—movies, folk
Songs with loud refrains, documentaries
On vapor relaying my name.
I make a sandwich. Ham and cut lettuce.
Beneath me, America burns
For love and what it obliterates.
The cats sag around themselves and don’t understand.
What is there to do but pack
The desperate letters down the kitchen drain.
Schoolchildren beg in dim green crayon.
Please come down. Harry—we love you.
Something about last chances.
I mail back ash in cream envelopes.
Then there is no breath at all.
