Colors
1.
The sun’s a grey aureole behind grey
clouds. Wind rattles a dead hollyhock.
Two shriveled, yellow petals, still
cling to the stalk. Color retreats from
the cold, sinks beneath the surface of
its own skin: yellow to grey-yellow,
soon to be swallowed by the grey sun.
2.
The stark white of a deer’s jawbone
sits in an empty pot. A buck eats
what’s in the compost bin, unaware
of the jawbone’s presence. The bone-
white of what’s unseen permeates
the world. Each bleached tooth, a spirit-
book, concealing and revealing (at
the same time) everything eating and
being eaten.
3.
A flock of magpies shifts, changes
shape across the canyon: protean-
blue, Narcissus-white, and the eternal
return of annihilation-black; the black
that prophesies an end, every end –
end of day, end of the world, an end
to this physical body, shifting into
twig, dust, and the liquid of black,
blue and white feathers hunting for
refuse. A hunger for what’s been left
behind, ignored, discarded.
4.
What is the color of the dying piñon-
shadow on snow? Shadow that seems
more alive than the tree, more precise,
defined. The color at the foot of a
glacier on a grey day, the color of
spirit-skin, the color of thoughts that
pass through the mind while lying in
snow. The color of the door to the after-
life, somewhere beneath the snow.
The spindly shadow sinks, drips slowly
through clay, into a chalice made of
human jawbone. Silent, silent. A
silence so deep it draws sound out of
me. I open my mouth and speak this
poem.
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Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including The Next World (Shanti Arts), Absence: Presence (Shanti Arts) and All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander); along with a novel, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). Several of his chapbooks can be found online, including Tidal Flats (Mudlark). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, with work appearing in Ecotone, Permafrost, Flyway, Banyan Review, The Shore, Hotel Amerika, Tiger Moth Review, and The Sun, among other journals. He lives in Oregon, works as a somatic-oriented mental health therapist at a clinic collective. https://christiengholson.blogspot.com/
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 