Turbulent stasis on a blue ground.
What is any art but static flame?
Fire of spun gold, grain.
This brilliant flickering’s
arrested by named (Naples,
chrome, cadmium) and nameless
yellows, tawny golds. Look
at the ochre sprawl—how
they sprawl, these odalisques,
withering coronas
around the seedheads’ intricate precision.
Even drying, the petals curling
into licks of fire,
they’re haloed in the pure rush of light
yellow is. One theory of color,
before Newton broke the world
through the prism’s planes
and nailed the primaries to the wheel,
posited that everything’s made of yellow
and blue—coastal colors
which engender, in their coupling,
every other hue, so that the world’s
an elaborated dialogue
between citron and Prussian blue.
They are a whole summer to themselves.
They are a nocturne
in argent and gold, and they burn
with the ferocity
of dying (which is to say, the luminosity
of what’s living hardest). Is it a human soul
the painter’s poured
into them—thin, beleaguered old word,
but what else to call it?
Evening is overtaking them.
In this last light they are voracious.