As if nothing has a color
And tomorrow is an absence —
Our one emotion is dolor —
A period is a sentence.
Why do we dream in black and white,
Fugal shapes dipped in clouds and ink,
In word-concatenations think,
And in zebra characters write?
Art starts with paper or canvas,
Both white, but proceeds to darken
As hours of inspiration pass,
Approaching black with brush or pen.
These poems reduce ordered paint
To something both more and less faint.