This Sea the Colour
but right now I can feel this orange
and tender light
taking a position inside of me—
(Tony Hoagland)
She’s heard you can’t get lost in the desert, only smaller, a tiny blemish on a peach, so she drives across sand to the north shore to feel the distance from home (nearer and farther with the tide), sits as close to the water as I am from you now, almost touching, folds her knees under her chin. Have you ever wanted to be that small? It snowed the first time in history this year, pale orange snow. She saw it, collects these stories like personality traits. When she’s recovered, she’ll use them to return to the world a butterfly, a miscellany of anecdote and tan lines. It’s not consolation, this sea the colour of fire and light, and if she wants to leave, she can. But what if all this empty space isn’t so bad, isn’t even empty
This poem has been composed as a sonnet of fourteen lines with justified margins. As text formatting varies according to device, screen and browser, the poem’s appearance may depart from this. You can also view this poem as a PDF (with fixed line breaks and line count) here. Listen to Angelina D’Roza reading this poem on location in Sheffield:
This is the first of six sonnets to be uploaded as part of The Rose of Temperaments. A ‘variant’ text, with additional input from A.B. Jackson, appears here.
The Rose of Temperaments | Poetry and Colour 