The Color That Is Loss

Herbert Morris

To sink is greenness. Having sunken, we
are grown-to-green and steeped so bitterly
in stain of it, to dark, to dense, to deep,
to tasting slow-slim spreads of it which seep
to down. And this is far, for higher hands
have hidden in the heat below the sands
to stroke the sun beneath the chill-shot night.

These are the losses, then: ourselves, and height
to shatter stars with burning; mouths to catch
the shimmering at lips, and lips to match
the stun-pull to the surf. Then dropped to this:
the singing of the knives we take to kiss;
ourselves, the growths of paralytic tongues
and leather fingers gripping at the rungs
of falling; dying past awakening,
below the full, above the coloring
that time is; journeys circular, and to
the never distance bound, through blaze, through blue,
through brimmings barbarous with sweep, with black,
with redolence of dank concretions; wrack
between the festerings of wormwood blown,
along the desolate lagoons of bone
and coral comings, passings, bleached to blanched
between the sun-scald and the sea-sting, branched

into integuments on caked-long blood,
to sheathing cooled-hard flesh. Then this is flood
of selves in stillnesses and tones of dark
awarenesses, with minute givings, stark
with tall and tautened doubtings meshed to link
us with descending. Greenness is to sink.