Jason Gray​

Color Is an Event: Blue

Lapis you’ve covered your lap in matches your eyes,
The skirt you’re wearing, lifted over thighs:
Blue lace receding from a white sand beach,
Oh sweet shipwreck. I would de-blue you stitch
By stitch, raise the bluest flame from your skin
With every kiss, flood and loose every vein
Until all left is your cloud-breaking peak.

​
With broken boots, with sorry song, desire
Leads to the Afghan mine where blue fire
Is blown with black powder into the world
And polished. Bullets were hurled
Here yesterday, perhaps tomorrow too.
Always, until the mountain crumbles to
The ocean, and the ocean throws it back.

---

Color Is an Event: Yellow

The sun is yellow.
                    The sun is a blotch
Of paint, the paint
                    Is egg yolk and
Orpiment crushed
                    With the utmost
Pressure for ten years--
                    If you can manage--
So much the better
                    Said Cennini
And don’t soil
                    Your mouth with it.
This is not for cowards.
                    The orpiment
Is arsenic
                    Sulfide, a rock
Layered impasto
                    With the run-off
From a volcano.
                    The sun is a volcano.
The sun is a poison.
                    The sun is the sun.

--
Jason Gray is the author of Radiation King, winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry, as well as Photographing Eden and the chapbooks How to Paint the Savior Dead and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo. HIs poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Image, and The Southern Review, among others. Find him online at http://jason-gray.net.