“[She] had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament.” Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900)
Mr. Wilde’s original, sinful, and revolutionary ideas on art and individualism reverberate to this day and much has been said about his extraordinary literary pursuits and exuberant ways, but not enough.
(c) gregoria green
This is one of my favorite quotes of his as I find that a ‘curious love of green’ is not about the mere spectacle of the color, but about a way to live life, to renounce all other allegiances, attachments, and callings and give in to an ecstatic green that carries one from the obscenity of the mundane tasks into the night and its dreamy debauchery.
You may read more about my chromatic obsession in a poem I wrote a few years ago entitled la vie en turquoise.
While I lie awake with you this fortunate evening
I breathe in the frosty cold and breathe out our winter tale
A bit of snow crystals, a bit of tender falling
I turn my head to face you
And mistake your freckles for snowflakes;
That’s the turning point
When the outer world metamorphoses
And the grey converts to white and clean and pure and seamless
A thin crack in the icy lake
Spreads alongside our wakeful bodies
Like a thread of forsaken memories
All sunk to the bottom of the water.
In one of your dormant memories,
There’s a pattern of a future us
Whereas here and now
You find me longing for faraway flesh
Whole bodies split by a continent
So much land, a waste of space between us
Nothing but borders, regulations, paperwork
While we do our own pen and paper work
As soon as the lamps dim, the aching ice
Begins to sparkle eons and as we look around
We catch a glimpse of our younger selves
Somehow trapped between all those faraway galaxies
That were once radiating their best light
For, after all,
They were in the presence of lovers.
Stars now stretch all throughout the frozen lake in an undying web of curious strings that have brought us closer; when you touch them, they vibrate at the same frequency we do and thus we know how the world was created. We hear the atoms collide, we hear the silence before the big bang and witness the birthing of our own universe, a flood of warmth and light, an icy spell. In this eerie nighttime, we seek poetry with hungry mouths and what we find is yet unknown.
As the ice cracks further and collapses beneath their bodies, the lovers clutch onto each other, not to save their lives, but to die, enlaced, of a little death.
Smell of home-baked bread and red wine,
Who will be here, watch my hair turn grey?
No moment like the next one
In my kitchenette of tears.
Who will breath into my bosom
While I lullaby them to a sweetest sleep?
A little one heralding noble beginnings
Why are lilacs late to bloom this year?
I reminisce over the fragrance on my window sill,
The warm welcome of the spring
No more within reach now
And I am not missed when I’m not home.
Come here come here, a voice whispers
The lover pours himself another glass
And as he drinks from the water of Lethe
He sinks into oblivion and love he serves no more.
Nescient of his forgetfulness
I remember everything: the long good nights,
Our long good falling and the longer goodbyes
As if they happened all at once.
And in that room as in that painting
We are inundated with choices and possibilities
And love becomes atemporal; Or do our seconds become longer?
So long that they’re not fading years after; Au revoir will be my short goodbye
I will only forget when I’m old,
Baking bread and sipping wine.
I am getting dreamier and I wish this wasn’t metal but flesh
I’ve befriended a tree today. Apricot, my mother tells me
It bent its flowers and gave me a taste of its magenta
Then I caressed its trunk and whispered Oh, how I wish it were human
Every night I hear a distant howl
A moan of a bird against all that is dark and silence
And it reminds me of the living Oh, how I wish it were human
Telling me lies, anything
A good night story
As solitary as always
Mute and singled out
The moon needs a companion
Someone human to tell her tale
Of angst and reverie
I hear the cries of pain in hospitals
I hear the cries of grief in houses
I hear the loneliness in your soft spoken words
Flesh and bone writhing under the weight of their own old souls And I know they’re human
Rain droplets against my windows
Falling
Falling
Falling
Water dripping on your body Maybe you are more than human…
Is a bruise a touch?
I bruise at the touch of your indifference
You blue-eyed Frankenstein
I am your dead blue rose now
Cursed to wither
Forevermore
here lies my mouth
a sweet and tender graveyard
crimson and wet
which you can’t shut or smear
in her nakedness
she only bleeds the truth
buried deep within greener lands
a powerhouse of creation
my driving force
feeding me the universe inch by inch
around the edges and all the way inside
with your own mouth you carry music
through my bruised veins
where decades become seconds
and seconds the beginning of time itself
and within your lips’ reach
distant galaxies are spinning at our pace
towards an obscene climax
i hear you lonesome lovelorn secluded poet
give me your words and phrases to swallow
and the promise you will stay
and sing and breathe
where my mouth lies
Gregoria Green 