Ode to Your Rainbow Road

With its coal-colored hat,

Proud triangular hat,

The yellow stood – dreaming

House and sunflower faces.

The green met the yellow

As you and I, beloved, have met

In dreams, the green

Dreaming itself as field astir.

The good and bad from yellow

Were born: you at the kitchen counter

Cutting lemons for lemonade,

Your humming itself lemonade,

You and I reading on the cottage lawn

Or quietly picnicking on the lawn

As bees hummed in pink-white petals,

As the sky sang its honey of poems.

A muted yellow, too, was seen:

Your face sickly, you lying in bed,

That last month a face of muted yellow.

The green – field, forest – rang

Its bells: your beauty one summer day

In the late 80s clothed with

a green and white polka dot dress,

you leaning against a wooden fence,

your leg lifted like a ballerina’s,

the classical pianist, too,

steeped in the emerald-green of summer power,

our conversations themselves that time

wide-ranging, golden-green

fields astir.

Your rainbow road pulled me along

Like a kaleidoscope of song.

Then the blue house, blue married

To white. The porch, the sliding door’s

Silhouettes were a single flow,

The cries of children submerged

In the slice of an orange glow.

How much we had, how much we shared

Years and years ago.

I can’t count the mornings that began

With you whipping up some eggs,

coaxing the toast onto the plate,

Orange juice coaxing my morning into Great.

Like one who lives in a house by the beach,

Like a swimmer drawn daily to the beach,

I awoke to the sounds of your motion,

Your cooking, footsteps, the pianist’s fingers, my ocean,

A presence, a love clothed in speech.

Oh blue married to white, my home,

Blue waxing lyrical a past, like foam.

And there it was, the twilight,

sprawling, encompassing the blue house and me,

with its red eye, or some crimson wound, some stain,

I felt would never die, or would like flotsam

Find me again and again,

Ripening, deepening into a net

Of your absence, your violet. And yet –

What vigor, what vim still went on

To color the wanderer’s sorrow,

To etch in the stars, angelic powers;

How much of you had heightened the indigo.

The sadness would go on –  but wasn’t

Sufficiently ample or wide

To overwhelm: you played this rainbow road

Like a seven-string guitar from the other side.

My delight, my merriment would blaze,

Be emblazoned with you for my remaining days,

Your absence my sadness and wonder mixed,

Your presence flaming in unfamiliar ways.