PALETTE OF THE UNIVERSE

“The universe is really beige. Get used to it.”
John Noble Wilford
The New York Times

For Richard

1.
The universe is beige, they say,
the color of a mule deer
running by the chickweed
blooming whitely on the bluff,
but knowing you wait
around the next bend of the trail,
I see checker-bloom with five
pink petals, ivory-veined,
surrounding a bluish-purple
lupine stalk, whose keel
petals cut the salt-laced breeze.
Buttercups—tiny suns
strewn across an open field—
wink like the points of light
dotting the sea that pounds
the beach below this headland
where I crouch to examine
bright red spikes and bracts
of Indian paintbrush, thinking
of your kiss, and this
universe of galaxies blending
to tan, drab as my old Mac,
reveals its true tints.

2.
Lying in light, reading
on the living room sofa
on Sunday morning, listening
to John Sheppard’s sacred chants
for six voices, I hear cinnabar,
olive, raw umber, magenta,
violet and chartreuse
mingling in counterpoint.
Later in our omelette
with bell pepper and feta
I can surely taste pearl,
Paris yellow, moss green,
and when you hold me, I feel
a surge of indigo, amethyst
and tangerine. Suddenly
stippled, mottled, streaked,
I don’t care if the universe
is the color of buckwheat
because iridescence spills
from you and me.

–Lucille Lang Day

ARTISTS

Dancers

Long after chalky eggs have drifted
on a floating mat,
even after young have hatched,

a pair of great-crested grebes,
sighting white cheeks
and pointed beaks after time apart,

start to dance. One bird dives
and swims toward the other,
who arches her back, fluffing herself

like a black-winged cat. The diver
bursts from water, wings outstretched.
The two plunge under,

re-emerge with weeds, like roses
in beaks, press breasts together,
treading water, and stamp their feet.

Musician

Rolling his fibrous, thousand-pound tongue,
a humpback croons a long, lush song,
“Ah, what a whale of a male I am,”

in a seven-octave voice. Swimming
in a sine wave, he slides
through the sea, a one-man band,

blending pure and percussive tones
in symphonic ratios with rhymed refrains.
You’d think he’d studied Mozart

and Bach as he leaps on beat, landing
with a hundred-ton splash
to belt an encore for the salmon and bass.

Architect

The satin bowerbird weaves an avenue
of twigs and sticks
with foot-high walls, adorned

with blossoms, beads and poker chips.
He makes paint of saliva
and berries, crushed and mixed,

daubs it on walls, brushing
with waxy leaves, then takes a flower
in his beak, dances down the bower,

singing, flapping his wings.
When he wins a mate, the walls
collapse as they violently conjugate.

Afterward she flies away
to make her own place: she’ll raise
her young alone in a plain brown nest.

Painters

Asian elephants, each with a brush
in its trunk, are Abstract Expressionists,
five-ton de Koonings, making

biomorphic shapes. Do you see
the king cobra under fan-shaped leaves,
the horns of an antelope, bamboo, teaks?

Colors capture rolling plains,
the Chao Phraya River delta, braided
into channels that flood rice fields

abuzz with mosquitoes. Layers of paint
record chaos that finally gives way
to the will of the artist, shifting her weight.

–Lucille Lang Day