Living Color

One day, a few years ago, I was driving back from one of my
long country crossings, to see family or return to friends,
or simply to see something or someone I was missing.
And I noticed that the matte "forest" green of each highway sign
I passed was hardly an accurate shade of forest
for I have seen more colors and shades in the shades
of tree branches in the tangle and trails of much-beloved
parks than anything those signs could ever show.

I thought that day about how few hues of our tools,
t-shirts, and toasters inspire us to reflect on the
delightful kaleidoscope of colors and lights, the many-
shaded skins of our world's surfaces. And my heart was heavy
because I knew that I spent so much of my time
remarking on manufactured landscapes.

So yesterday afternoon, I put my nose to the grass
and I inhaled its strange scent, and took blades of
its many fingered surfaces in between my toes and
I felt its waxy surfaces and its sharpened edges
and I pondered its deep greens that fade to black
and the lines of faint yellow that trace its curves
and I thought of the chloroplasts working out mysteries
that no human eye has seen in their naked forms
and of the light that lends itself to the leaves
as each plant receives its color from the sun
and I wanted to look not at painted surfaces
anymore but at the ever-changing real-time
images that I can't capture, can't frame,
can't freeze, can't reduce into some constant
understanding. I wanted to look closely.
and be overwhelmed by the earth's living color.