Very Strong February

A man and a woman pretend to be white ice

Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm

With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines

One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch

The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain

Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know

You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February

A week or two left on distracting black trees

Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again.

Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman

Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the

chair

Or part of the sum of what big white families think up

To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological

company.

At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget

To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm

anyway

Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory

In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can

Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce

Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow.

This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it

Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is

actually

In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound

Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet

Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said some-

thing yesterday

To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and

white tomorrow

Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses

Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall

tonight.

Source: A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992)