“I take up/the nourishment of his pale green eyes.”
Just like Frank O’Hara wrote about James Dean
I will write your eyes. Not Dodge City sky blue, not
the azure of a clean Mexican ocean, not even the shade
of Midwestern cornflowers.
No, your eyes are the color
of a sad-angled guitar twang. The medium acid wash
of naturally faded jeans. The cerulean abstraction
of a man’s splash as he jumps seventeen stories
into a chlorinated swimming pool.
Your eyes are more
powerful than Yves Klein’s monstrous monochromatic
case studies. As iconic and otherworldly as Neptune.
And through insomniac purgatory, cocaine insanity, cold
cases of beer, brown bottles of room temperature whiskey,
self-induced dynamite explosions, Hollywood
black lists, and your Blue Velvet return, always alive.
Your eyes
are as tragic and magnetic as the promise
of that Last Movie nightmare, that Easy Rider
dream, the so-sweet-you-can-almost-taste-it color
of the upper left corner of our American flag.
