March
Yesterday, when I came home
from work there was a rainbow.
It’s the kind of thing one hesitates
to write about. You know
it’s remarkable—all those gaudy colors
set down in the stubble field
and arcing up into the greyshine
blue of sky that’s yielded
its clouds to light. But how do you get
it right without overblowing
the thing? You’re always a half step away
from unicorns with rainbows—
and that’s the thing with recording the world,
no one will believe you
if you actually get it right. The bird
that sings to me all through
the spring, whose song I know as if
it were my own, I can’t
describe to anyone (much less
the internet), so the slant
of its melody is all I have.
If I tried to use metaphors
to describe it you would probably laugh
at my syrupy rainbow words,
and if I tried to sing it to you
here, you’d close the book
I’m sure. It’s hard to handle singing
in a book. So I am stuck
not knowing what bird it is because
it is so beautiful.
Does that make sense? I hope it does
because I think that’s all
I can say about it at this point
without unmaking my point.
But to get us back to the rainbow, I
saw it drop and anoint
the smallish valley where the creek
begins to assert itself
as a creek in earnest when I stopped the car
to check the mail. The shelves
of color arranged themselves into
the field like birdsong. I thought
for a second that the rainbow actually
had an end. But then I caught
myself in my fantasy and remembered
that everything was the same
as always, just color had given a moment
its unbelievable name.
Read three poems by Nathaniel Perry previously appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Jeff Stamer, courtesy Shutterstock.