Blue Over Orange

Back in September I quoted a poem here by Aleda Shirley called Green Oldsmobile. That poem came to my notice in a special section of Poetry Magazine devoted to poets who had died in 2008.

I discovered that the San Francisco library where I work did not have Shirley's final book of poetry called Dark Familiar (Sarabande Books, 2006) so I ordered it. The pace of the book-dsitribution world seems to be slowing down as the electronic info-world speeds up, so it did not surprise me that the paper copy of Dark Familiar only arrived this past week, seven months after the order was placed.

Several poems in the book have the same titles as Mark Rothko's paintings, or at least they sound the same:

Brown, Black on Maroon

Three Blacks on Dark Blue

Purple, White and Red

My favorite in the collection is called Blue Over Orange and is set in the autumn, so quoting it now in the spring seems like a proper tribute to the time when I learned about this poet, after she had already died.

October's first cold day & when I get in the car

my breath forms a brief chrysanthemum

on the inside of the windshield & I'm aware,

suddenly, of all the yellow leaking from the world,

the lost green veins of the leaves. On my list

of errands the last stop is the video store where

the movies I watched in college are now classified

as Cult Favorites or Classics & the beautiful boy

who works the counter rolls his eyes when I take out

the Truffaut for the dozenth time. Not again, he says.

He's nice to everyone, but he sees me, if he sees me at all,

as an adult woman in a dark coat, with an expensive bag.

We touch only when we exchange money. The lobby

of a narrow French apartment, an allee of poplars:

those are scenes from a movie, not my life. I'm unlikely

to rent the movies that excite him: Japanese animation,

a documentary on mountain climbing, seventies concert films

from before he was born. Hours later, at home

with my glass of bourbon, he's with me still, & I think,

out of nowhere I tell myself, about how when I was thirteen

& we lived overseas I saw middle-aged NCOs

with beer guts & sunburned scalps walking the streets

of San Angeles City, holding the hands of girls

not much older than I was, girls paid to be adoring,

who covered their mouths when they giggled

& wore strange yellow nylons the color of no human skin.

When we'd walk down those streets, my friends & I,

our raffia bags stuffed with devalued pesos,

Filipino boys would sit on their haunches & make

wet clucking sounds at us. Back then I imagined the misery

of the teenaged prostitutes, though not in any detail,

& the men's daughters stateside, reading

Tiger Beat in their rooms, trying on Yardley lipstick.

Later I thought about the wives, left behind

at Lackland or Minot or Clovis, the scent

of coffee, Salems, Emeraude, & something that may

or may not have been history pushing them to the sides

of their own lives; now I think of the men –

how little of life turns out to be a choice, after all,

& the way those choices we do make

can transform beauty into pathos or desire

into commerce. We are, all of us, almost alike.