john olson

The Prodigality of Green

It is not that the form in which something may be thought is indifferent to what is thought, but that thinking in colors is different than thinking in iron.  Many brilliant hues of thought blossom in a greenhouse daily without so much as a zipper. Liberal ears adorn the scarecrow, yet the convolutions of the clouds go unheard. Pain bursts out of a harmonica and if anyone happens to notice a red scarf caught in the barbed-wire it is a nominal but pleasant gratuity, like an extra button on a sleeve. What else is there beyond the design evident in things? Spaghetti? Algebra? Nudity?

Nudity always sounds accurate on a dulcimer.

But is accurate really the most accurate word? For nudity? For a dulcimer? For a naked individual playing a dulcimer? For certain characteristics of consciousness shaped into rain? Sometimes there are inaccuracies in us that are there for no particular reason. Spasms, humors, ambiguities. Existential qualifiers paraphrased as meringue. 

I think of tar as a form of memory. Black, sticky, hard to work. But once it dries and settles into place, there you are: a highway. A mimetic impulse made suddenly tangible as skin. Which is smooth. Which is veined. Which is a vehicle of touch. Which is a curvature, or membrane.

White stripes, yellow lines. The so-called logical modalities. How do we sequence DNA? How do we know about Greek mathematicians? How do we perceive time? How do we find our way? How do we tell truths that might hurt?
There are means. Means to bring Tucson into focus, or forget it altogether, and head north to Flagstaff.

Bananas don’t have skeletons, though the truth to anything is never easy to peel, except radius and circumference, and even they get confused, confused with rocks, confused with horses, confused with intermezzos and dizzying precipices, confused with dice games and hornswaggles, a statue of a horse as a horse, or another kind of horse, a live horse, a live horse with legs and hooves and a swishing tail, horses in the rain, horses on the plains, horses in Wide Ruin, horses where everything is vast, even the negatives are vast, and inferences are huge and cumbersome, and the stores are closed, and protons leap the Coulomb barrier, and a reverie of leopards gets entangled with the campaniles of Venice, which rang out during an earthquake in the summer of 2004. Here is where the ostrich costs a lot of energy and does glissandos around the bank. Insects shine because death bulges out of elegies, and worries bulge out of consciousness like area codes telescoping into marigolds. There is nothing so thin it cannot serve as a stem and nothing so thick it cannot be converted to steam. There are moments and there are moments. Driver instructor headed the wrong way down a one-way street. A chestnut promulgating the prodigality of green.