In Nashville

We learned color on the radio

I fell asleep thinking

Names are inherited like blind blue eyes and thin fingers

“Green” could just as soon be “Lila” or “Nyekundu” 

“Blue” might have been “Amarillo”

Linguists have drawn deep lines through the shades.

  And more too, that people see them differently that

Certain teals may appear aqua to someone else and this startling news: that

Very few people, and all of them women, are born with the ability

To see an incredibly rare shade of almost purple.

  Somewhere near Birmingham

I counted white lines on the black highway

The sea in Homer’s Odyssey is wine-red.

  In Florida

A new friend unfolded herself to me in a myriad of oranges and

I told her about the greenish barnacles I can’t pull out of my insides

She fell asleep in my bed and I wondered if her hair was really blond

If those were really

Her knees in the backs of mine

Or just the word, “knees”

And my imagination

  In the morning I knocked my own knee against a bookshelf

And we agreed her hair was brown

But the sun was gold and the lemons in the fridge were yellow

When the sky opens up to the plains,

Rain soaks through the things that I want

  To hold your name forever on the roof my mouth

To run very fast in the other direction

Surface Texture

I have spent most of my life desiring depth

Relinquishing depth

Falling deep into Vermont’s thick mud, getting lost and

Confusing love with a collision of bodies

  I made seven plaster breast molds for a sculpture class last year

They were these hardened orbs, these mesmerizing spheres,

You could fit at least your fist in the back of each one

Except mine,

I remind myself, my chest is not deep but

It doesn’t ache

It doesn’t beg for bondage and

It doesn’t ache,

  And this: that

  I’ve known in it

Fallen low in it

Slid slowly into it

The deep ocean’s shifting currents, it’s spiteful, shrinking jetties, I swim,

In love with the sound of my own deep breath

The way the clock goes back before foreword,

The Puerto Rican delicatessen who slips me Swedish fish

  I’ve skinned my shins in the middle of a 4”8 at the Pennsylvania relays

I’ve spent whole days on hot concrete waiting to explode

  I’ve been eleven in the backseat of a station wagon

Happily wrapping and rewrapping a pair of new high top converse