The Color Green
By Chana Bloch
Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck,
he’s clamped for good
in an iron lung. When it’s time to eat
he nudges his head a sweaty mile
to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while.
His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes
steer me from cupboard to fridge:
he would like his chicken burrito
cut into bite-size pieces,
a bent straw for his glass of water, please.
How does the body live its only life
in a cage? I watch him compute the distance
from bar to bar, and squeeze
between them
with a violent compression, a fury of bursting free
that doesn’t last.
His will is a crowbar, angled to pry up
the rooted intractable weight
of matter. I watch him slyly, I check out
the way he does it. He
does it. But pain in its absolute privacy
weighs what it weighs.
I come here to study the soul, posing one question
a dozen ways, most of them silent.
“If I’m only a body,” he laughs,
“I’m up shit creek.” His laugh
a gritty eruption of rock, salt and breath.
Like me he writes poems
but he does it letter by letter
on a propped keyboard, the mouth-stick
wobbling between his teeth.
That kind of speed keeps a poet accountable.
He won’t ever say, “The grass is very green”
when it’s only green.
Copyright Credit: Chana Bloch, "The Color Green" from Blood Honey. Copyright © 2009 by Chana Bloch. Reprinted by permission of Autumn House Press. www.autumnhouse.org
Source: Blood Honey (Autumn House Press, 2009)