The Latecomer
“We love to contemplate blue,” Goethe wrote, “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it."
“Blue: as yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful - but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours
Scribbled white flower,
stellate or trumpet
brushed chair back,
tie and bind the bellflower...
Black leathered nymphet,
blindfolded and blurred
between violet and green,
what hint? What tint
was the last to be seen?
Was blue blue before
there was a word?
Was blue?
Blue was blue
before and after it was noticed.
Was blue
rayleigh scattering,
cried the lamenter?
Drips of heart-shaped silphium
seeds was scepter. Was-scepter,
commands the latecomer!
To us! To us! The rest
pinked, purpled, and yellowed;
asemic negation.
The graffitied wall screamed
hues of lapis lazuli;
sky, sea, and eyes
blurred of teal,
blurred of ultramarine
to feel! To feel,
but for bare feet...
they stand surrounded
behind the pollocked chair,
softly.
in front of that wall, that wall
layered from all eight blue periods.
Layered in this ninth moment,
Gainsborough still battles
for his blue boy,
cut into color; jade and turquoise.
until we have a way to describe something,
it's not there!
Not in ancient Chinese,
not in the Koran or Hebrew Bible was it mentioned,
not in the wine-dark sea of Homer's Odyssey;
blue was there but not there.
Latecomer blue,
dye egyptian blue.
The blue nudes of Matisse are mine
to cut and beg for release,
beg, spill, and splatter...
Yinmn, azure, persian, or Klein.
Whip backsplash, beg, roll,
beg to bend over,
white eyes drip without a clue
of cobalt mood,
in seizure... seize the sparkling wit,
the latecomer begs to sit!
