There
There,
that image
that remains when you close your eyes, (don't look at the sun), don't stare too
hard at anything (but those images stay), those colors, those times, those
places stay as superimposed layers and fade into themselves, (peeking through
one behind the other). The boundaries help you see it all. You know (you know)
those straight lines that make the space, the horizon, the grids of roads, the
frames of windows and doors, they help you see (because they help you shape). When
you were a kid and you let your eyes lose focus, (erase the lines) remember
those colors then, the blue, the green, the yellow, the world felt newer then,
and
there.
Do you remember
the so many windows in so many countrysides through so many times that spilled
light unto the two of us? Do you remember them, rectangles framing greens and
blues and yellows? Do you remember them, portals into other landscapes of
shapes always (always) in relation to the horizon? I remember. I remember all
the theres, all the times the light was silver/white and gold/yellow and
cool/cold and warm/hot. When the shadows leaned forward or sideways or behind.
I remember all the times there. I remember the bleed of colors outside the
frames, so blue so green so aquamarine so teal so turquoise and all the shades
absorbing and reflecting wavelengths of light. So very much there inside and
outside those quadratic shapes. You loved all the yellows, you lived in that
golden now, ignore the lines, the boundaries, it is all just being now you said
there.
That
image, of the golden moment that shifted to blue green (it has other names that
color, and is infinite in its shades) but, not us, trapped between finite lines
in finite time, in finite places, in the south of France, on the coast of
Italy, in the southwestern deserts, on the lip of the Pacific. Bounded and unbounded, shaded and not, flat or
reflective, the shape of the golden moment, more diffused, (like our two bodies
in all those other theres), by the burden of the finite. So, remember all the light, interrupted by, ripped by, cooling and quickening dark blue,
that shape, it looms, is cornered for now but threatens to swallow all the
blues, all the greens, all the yellows, all the light, all the golden
there.
But now, interior
and exterior seem relative to the dark blue, fixed in opposites, failing to
blend (even when you let your eyes lose focus) because time has trapped us in a
there in which we two fade into the blues, the greens, the yellows (and you
always golden). Photographs only now, trapping those colors (but maybe faded
now) framing the blues, the greens, the yellows (centering them corner matched
to corner, so many windows and doors). Memory does not sharpen but diffuses all
the theres, all the moments, all the
versions of us in those times and places. We two have travelled together,
settled together, blended together, through the landscapes, the rooms, the
doors, the places, but always always my love, even in this time soaked older
world rimmed with gold, we two remain in the always
there.
A Canadian ex-pat, Rina Palumbo (she/her), is working on a novel and two long-form nonfiction writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al.