Yellow

John Hollander

Dirty gold sublimed from the black earth up
In bright air: these are the awaited stalks,
The ripeness possible to imagine
Even among mezzotints of winter,
And to remember having imagined
Oddly amid late spring's lackadaisies
And all of the earlier primulas.
Prophetic pale flecks of forsythia
Lemony against the cold engravings
Of gray branches-these whisper of golden
Flashings over the surface of water
Above the attentive images of
Jonquils peering out at themselves along
The wide bank. Which would be no fulfillment
In any event, of early pallor:
It would remain an interpretation
Of the flimsy text, half unremembered,
Dimming evermore and diminishing.

Like gold afire in the yellow candles'
Flame, steady with remembrances and now
And then only wavering in regret,
What might have been burns up and the bright fruit
Of what we after all have ever ripens.
The squinting flames eye each other as fruit
And flame and eye and yellowy flower.

To have been kept, to have reached this season,
Is to have eternized, for a moment,
The time when promise and fulfillment feed
Upon each other, when the living gold
Of sunlight struck from the amazing corn
Seems one with its cold, unending token,
The warm time when both seem reflections from
The bright eyes of the Queen of the Peaceful
Day being welcomed with these twin burnings,
These prophetic seeds of the Ripener,
Brightness rising and getting on with things.

Or: In the air there is a soft gleaming
As of fair light in certain hair, and wind
Through the pale curtains streaming like moonlight
In the dark air that fills all the rooms of
Dreaming like a perfumed tune that will ne'er .. .
(Vanish? A snuffed lamp in the dream of day?)
This has been all of silver. But see now:
The man of earth exhales a girl of air,
Of her light who lies beside him, gentle
And bare, under the living shawl of all
Her long hair, while her short below softly
Touches his tired thigh with welcoming.
It is that she is there. It is the pure
Return of everlastingness in her
Hands and the readiness of the sweet pear
In the touch of her mouth that fill the air
-Even the air within the circle of
His emptied arms-with light beyond seeming.

The possible metal underwater,
Beer-can or amulet, its reflections
More important than those of the surface
(Remember those jonquils we had before),
This is one thing: but another matter
Is of the precious glare in eloquent
Watery surfaces-in them, but not
Of them. And all that matters in the end


Is of the moment of late, fine morning
When the world's yellow is of burning sands
Leading down to the penultimate blue
Of, say, the Ionian Sea whose waves
Gave light that had to have been of their own
And which, when darkened momently by the
Cool shadows of our gaze, plucked up the deep
Hues of our gleaming feet at the bottom
Of our golden bodies in their purest
And most revealing element at last.