2 Poems
Karen McPherson
Apprehensions
In a broad patch of sun on the kitchen floor
she stretches her full length into luxurious
drowse. She has no idea. Her body’s doing
its work unimpeded.
I try to match her breathing, to think thought
without language: a deep unwitting.
Pleasure.
Breath to breath, eager to outflank both mind
and tongue, I’m trying to transpose myself
into sound alone. Words, dead flakes of skin
to be brushed away.
Yet they skitter, chirp, unable not to put a name
to this. I feel them nudging, trailing like, as if,
culling images I wanted sidelong, because everything
is an album with pasted corners and penciled legends.
Thinking about thinking, I’m mirrored into a distant
vanishing, clinging to frame: this damn poem.
YInMn
The chemist is intensely proud
of his most vibrant error. He didn’t invent
the color, only its material expression.
The smear across the palette colder
than Prussian, warmer than Cobalt.
And though the building blocks themselves
are shimmering, unstable, this is a blue
that will never fade.
Isn’t this what pigment is: you take some dazzling
mix of light and hue reflected only in the mind,
some deepening insight scarcely gleaned
at the very edge of the spectral, and you distill it,
spin it wildly on its helix to extract the elemental,
which can then be ground to powder, thinned to paste?
YInMn, like some divinity, its name unpronounceable,
is airier than Cyan, weightier than Steel, inkier than
the deepest water tinctures. And yet, the chemist’s shirt
is a washed-out blue, his eyes blue, too, depending
on the light.
The evening sky is fading fast, shifting, fragile,
leaching its blues along the river’s edge.
~
Note: YInMn Blue, also known as Oregon Blue, is an inorganic blue pigment that was accidentally discovered by Professor Mas Subramanian and his student Andrew E. Smith at Oregon State University in 2009.
Karen McPherson is a post-academic, wokeproud, elderqueer poet and literary translator. Her publications include Skein of Light (Airlie Press), Sketching Elise (Finishing Line Press), and Long for This World (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in literary journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, december, and Potomac Review.