“Whoever thought any quality to be a heterogeneous
Aggregate, such as Light is discovered to be. But, to determine
More absolutely, what Light is, after what manner refracted,
And by what modes or actions it produceth in our minds the
Phantasms of colours is not so easie. And I shall not mingle
Conjectures with certainties.”

We choose our colors
But to be seen requires another’s attention
And even then s/he will only see what light allows

We choose our colors
To attract another even profoundly other
Depending on light’s radiant density to stimulate

We choose our colors
Seeking to assimilate
Avoiding any spotlight

We choose our colors
Hoping to highlight how I’m unique
Needing light to unclothe my conceit

Conjoined contrasting complementing contradicting
Most of us deciding to reuse a previously painted
Canvas choosing to clean and cover when we could
Resurrect. Yet all that’s hidden will still exert its
Presence especially when a certain angle of light
Glances the surface or as an especially sensitive
Eye carefully considers our compositional layers

Joy and pain
Pride and shame
Delight and despair

Starting with black
Absorbing
Adding some white
Reflecting
Variations of yellow
Red green and
All that’s in-between
Iridescent as a rainbow
Fixed star
Aurora Borealis
My blind spots
From trying to
Survey the sun

“Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light”

I much prefer Motherwell
But at certain hours I can see
In Antoine’s rococo impressions
Renditions of specific
Experience I do not Find in
Robert’s vivid expressions
The key question however is not
Motherwell or Watteau Rothko or
Rembrandt Picasso or Poussin
But for you and me
What is our subject genre technique
In mixing our palette which colors
How thick what brushes how coarse

Compline 

It is time for bed perhaps for sleep
Surely for dreams
Do you dream in black and white or color
How do you combine
Darkness and Light
Do you neatly divide or subtly synthesize
Do you lean more toward
Motherwell’s calligraphy or
Watteau’s chiaroscuro
Which is your reflexive preference

(note: original, changes made in published version)

“It can be no longer disputed, whether there be
Colours in the dark, nor whether they be the
Qualities of the objects we see, no nor perhaps,
Whether Light be a Body. For since Colours are the
Qualities of Light, having its Rays for their intire
And immediate subject, how can we think those
Rays qualities also, unless one quality may be subject
Of and sustain another; which in effect is to call it Substance.”

But discretion ought not be mistaken
For lack of affection as Darkness
Fully intends to join with the Light
Starting with sophisticated conversation, but
Eventually in quivering star-lit consummation

Darkness is exquisitely discreet
Barely noticed on first arriving
Embarrassed to in any way intrude
His blush sometimes claiming the
Attention he clearly seeks to elude

After spending most of the day with her brother
Artemis remains to claim an independent reign
Her soft light now sharing with the setting sun a
Magical hour well-suited for whispers walks and
Watching a trio of bats do mid-air pirouettes

Vespers

It has been eighty nights since the longest day
Apollo no longer tarries, not even as Aphrodite
Dressed in shimmering silver arises in the west
Royal blue gradually dimming in hue saturation
And tone, the frequency of light waves slowing

“The manner, how colours are produced
By the prism, is evident. For, of the Rays,
Constituting the incident light, since those
Which differ in colour differ in Refrangibility,
They by their unequal refractions must be
Severed and dispersed into an oblong form
In an orderly succession from the least
Refracted Scarlet to the most refracted Violet.”

And yet I have been surprised to find my
Favorite blue – a deep lingering indigo –
Being made by mixing my preferred with
Your red our diverse angles refractions
Reflections inflexions entirely entwined

Preference does not suppress the full
Spectrum, but I tend to wrap myself
In delft designs with just a few
Green contrasts and may even
Grow noxious seeing too much red

From this analysis emerging
Varieties of preference – mine for
Blue – yours for green or yellow or
Red each a lustrous fragment of
An extravagant chromatic continuum

None

Cognition is the human prism
Fracturing a whole into its
Contingent parts allowing us
To see divided what we
Cannot conceive combined

“The most surprising and wonderful
Composition was that of Whiteness…
There is no one sort of Rays which alone
Can exhibit this. Tis ever compounded
And to its composition all the aforesaid
 Primary colours, mixed in due proportion.
I have often in admiration beheld
That all the colours of the prism being
 Made to converge and thereby to be
Again mixed as they were in the light before
It was incident upon the prism…
Entirely and perfectly white”

While Apollo hunts alone
Sun high in the sky
Artemis standing aside
His countenance so glorious the
Clouds melt away leaving him
Robed in royal blue oracular
Brilliance and the purest of white

So we tend to follow muted grays
Rather than let the light lead us
Learning to stop when the spear’s
Shadow falls directly north waiting
Until the highest point is past and
Only then we begin again to pray

Sufficiently uncomfortable
That I expect there was
For some considerable relief
When it was noon and darkness
Came over the whole earth
It’s much cooler in the shade

Continuing through the
Days of Awe in a mild state
Of existential apathy
The cause of which can
Be reasonably deduced by
Observing the fact that
Most of us spend almost
All of everyday preoccupied
With shadows barely
Acknowledging the
Suffuse whiteness
Flowing from the blinding
Disc about us other than
Strain from any sustained
Effort to look directly at it

Sext 

From the head of the year
To the eve of atonement
We are invited to reconcile
Each with each and all
Which mostly we neglect

“Some Rays are disposed to exhibit red colour
And no other; some a yellow and no other,
Some a green and no other, and so of the rest.”
Each Ray proper and particular to itself yet
Depending as well on reception and perception

Earth’s axis tilts nature’s green veil lifting
To reveal sub-rosa hints: lemon yellows
Ochre reds supple violets of well veined
Solliès figs. Artemis disrobed, her marmoreal
Breasts burnished by her brother’s bright brow

We be between future and past
Creatures of pre-existing conditions
Creators of whatever we permission
Looking south our left illumined
Right in shadow. Which do we choose?

At a hinge of infinite geometric planes
One earth’s axis plus an abstraction
This same axis and you, here and now
Time measured at the angle of transit
Where personal zenith crosses the celestial

Terce

Long shadows reach into the future
Light flows forward from the past
Especially bright on history’s edge
Earth hurtling fast into the solar wind
Sun blazing between 30 and 40 degrees

“Colours are not Qualifications of Light
Derived from Refractions or Reflections of
Natural Bodies but original and connate
Properties, which in divers Rays are divers.”
Color found in the fracturing of light itself

As color awakes we would probably agree
Light reflects: more sun prompting perception
Of deeper colors. Direct light unveiling nature’s
Subtle gradation of form. Brighter the light
More florescent the object, varied the color

Apollo arrives replacing his father
Twins now dancing or are they racing
In either case finding seizing this day.
Owl calling through fog crow crying in a tree
All rising as life is restored to color by 6:33

Three minutes before six all is
Black gray cobalt and Egyptian blue
But beginning beyond the mountain
Below that wisp of cloud the east
Glimmers with pale yellow and pink

Prime

Zeus and Artemis embrace
Father with daughter dancing
Across the dome of space
Their tender radiance
Extending to us here below

“Whence arises all that order and beauty
Which we see in the world… The changing of
Bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very
Conformable to the course of Nature,
Which seems delighted with transmutations.”

What is real?
What I see in this weak light
Or what I will see at sunrise
What I perceive here and now
Or what I remember of yesterday

My mountain meadow becoming a
Grisaille landscape moonlight washing away
Sunny glazes extracting sculptural form
Resilient flora becoming as if resistant
Marble chiseled in classical relief

Grass that I know as green appears as
White oak leaves a cloudy kind of gray
Considering the sky I discern (conjure?)
Dirty blue or creamy brown or dusty violet
Perception informed by texture more than tint.

Liturgy of Hours

Lauds

Half-moon moving through cloudless
Cusp of night and late summer morning
Binary of pearly light and velvet shadow
Dim isolated stars zodiac entirely erased
Able to count each apple on their tree

Where Mary escaped the massacre of innocents
A crowd’s innocence is betrayed in self-righteous
Revenge. On the same day at the same hour
That I pause to wonder how beauty abounds sixteen
Centuries of beauty is lost to malevolence enflamed.

Grief anger mutual reproach extracting the
Middle dividing the whole dispersing each part
Ancient umbilicus mutilated modern memory
Impoverished sacred connections severed
We succumb to that which separates.

Meanwhile at the top of another continent
Millions are packed between river and desert
Shared space dense with variegated time
Rage released by the massacre at Rabaa
Exploding in assault, arson, and murder.

Finding in this midst a portal to the
Ultramundane, where modest is
Magnified becoming unexpectedly
Marvelous If I will perceive and
Receive its metamorphosis.

Despite the intrinsic mediocrity
Morning mid-day post-meridian and
Evening gradually emerge into
Glorious light: Conversation soft
Shadows illumination contemplation.

Revirgining

On Mary’s mid-August memoriam
I awake near my continent’s middle
In a mid-range hotel in a middle
Sized city (paid with Marriott points)
Well past prime, long past mid-life.

Stepping into sunlight
Blindingly bright

Where I trip and fall
Scraping my shin

Lending my blood
To the Delphiniums

Gauzing the wound
Retrieving my pants

Beginning again…

To scour this skin
Shave this stubble

Slipping into a steaming bath
Emerging somewhat raw and red

Smearing oil onto my head
Over my naked body

Scratch the scab
Scrub the hair

Brush my teeth
Even the tongue

Clip each claw
Every ragged edge

Opportunity
To strip my selves

To remove each layer of
Protection projection

To scour this skin
Shave this stubble

Insistent
Introvert

Persistent
Hypocrite

More moons will rise
Several more mornings

Analyst writer: breaking apart
Artist poet: bringing together

Colleague
Friend

Pretentious prig
Promiscuous gadfly

Several endings
Fewer starts

Of which I am now aware
But I may be hard-of-heart

Husband and father
Lover creator

Unfinished

Twelve full moons
As many imaginary months

Three-hundred and more mornings
Too many twelve-hour-days

At least four seasons
Maybe six

Leaving us uncertain now which way we ought to go. Down
The mountain by which we came or across terra incognito
“Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere…
Et quisquis amores…
Aut metuet dulcis aut experietur amaros”

(Not mine betwixt such rivals to decide…
For whosoever loves…
Tastes what is both bitter and sweet)

Sun failing thunder sounding lightning flashing it begins to rain
Rushing across the tree tops warning of what’s to come
Falling hard on the meadow bending flower and grass
Tumbling down the road in a sudden river washing away
Tracks leading lower into town, bridges to our past

Morning moisture gathers among the mountaintops
Continents of clouds rising into oceans of sky
As the sun ascends islands become archipelagos
Indonesian Aegean Caribbean in titanic collision
Lifting the Himalaya arousing Kala Patthar and Pumori

Mish:
We welcome your creation, demonstration
Or argument for any Good or goods We might
Incorporate but We also depend on your courage
Persistence and persuasion to prove a profit
To justify our adaptation to earn our respect

Tse:
I will make it worth your while
There is a fuller reality a greater love
A better way to balance each with all

Mish:
We shall see

Mish:
Expect or respect?
We are not innately generous
But neither jeer nor cheer
Opening to advantage when
Value is confirmed strength derived

Tse:
I am dismayed at your fixation on strength
Brutality excluding much that is best
Vulgar disregard for the Truth

Mish:
We are you and you are We
Please be yourself but unselfishly
We seek to preserve a constructive
Balance of what is good for each
And – especially – best for all

Tse:
I hear you and know too well smug smiles
Deft dismissals and much worse
Whenever you do not fully expect what I do

Mish:
We shed what does not contribute
To our commonwealth of strength
We mitigate threats to our shared
Sense of tribe team interdependence
All for one and one for all

Tse:
I have not known this gathering round me
Instead you have essentially said to
Deny my self to stop being me

Mish:
We do not require or need your
Agreement We do expect
Your constant respect We do
Require dutiful discretion
We will enforce the social order

Tse:
I am quite aware of your discipline
And while I do not seek confrontation
I have experienced much to controvert

Mish:
We have fed and clothed you
Taught and scolded you
We have inducted you into society
Our sources of order and meaning
Explained how We measure success

Tse:
I have received your instructions
Acknowledge your intentions
But cannot say I fully agree

      III.      Tsedeq and Mishpat

Mish:
We conspire across every culture
Far beyond memory’s reach
We are repository of failures’ formula
Victory’s treasure steward of surgeries
That barely cured us nearly killed us

Tse:
I am who I am here and now
Singular self unfolding only one
In uneasy communion with you

Philodemos:
You do not yet wear the toga.
You have been fed fiction when other
Studies would be far more nutritious
Still your mind is supple even subtle.

I have, however, heard the nickname
With which your chums berate you
Telling me the caution they see and
Know you would be better without.

I am sorry to make you blush
But your anxiety is my own special enemy
Who I have pledged to exterminate
Whoever and wherever he may touch.

I proffer: happiness is absence of pain
Which we may easily even blithely claim
If we learn not to fear: failure, folly or
Death, to celebrate our friends and live simply.

This day in me you have a new friend
Perhaps I will earn your phileo through
Further conversation and by bringing you to
Know realities only mathematics can show.

Philodemos:
Your proposition being there is no universal cause of happiness?

Praetaxtatum:
Cause emerges from context
Where Pericles found his happiness
Is not where Philodemos finds his
Archimedes glad where Aristophanes is sad

Philodemos:
Are you happy?

Praetaxtatum:
Is this a philosophical inquiry?

Philodemos:
Might happiness come of something less frebile
In one chalice of wine instead of nine
In quiet contemplation rather than raucous war
In appreciation contra constant acquisition

Praetaxtatum:
Surely there are alternate states
What makes a boy of thirteen happy
Might sometime strike you as insipid.
You would not be wrong, but neither am I.

Philodemus:
So Roman happiness, it sounds, is prolific?

Praetextatum:
As sand on a windward shore
As maggots on a battlefield
As hangovers following a feast

Philodemos:
A happy marriage?

Praetextatum:
In your Greek I hear what my own Latin
Would claim as fecund, felicitous, fertile.
If so this coupling has been, as you say, happy
But with such sibling strife rather less than blissful.

Praetextatum:
Fragments of a few, but not many
Some names vaguely familiar
Are each philosophers like you?

Philodemos: 
What does that word – philosophy –
Mean to you?

Praetextatum: 
Philo meaning love
Sophis meaning wisdom
Philosophy is a verb
Betrothed to its subject.

Praetextatum:
Herodotus, Hesiod
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides…
Xenophon, Thucydides
Homer of course, some others.

Philodemos:
Gods and goddesses abounding.
What of Thales, Pythagoras
Zeno perhaps, Archimedes of course
Euclid or Eudoxus or Democritus?

II.       Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas

Philodemos: 
I am told you compose Greek verse.

Praetextatum:
Yes sir, but it is, I know, weak poetic pabulum.

Philodemos:
What Greek have you read?

Menalcas. 
I am a market-maker.
I do not bet but bend motion my way.
Life is a game of skill not chance knowing
When and how to play what and who.
(As I am playing now you.)
But – given your predilections – surely we can
Agree what’s a much finer bet: I’ll wager two
Cups of beech wood, carved by divine Alcimedon
To which a pliant vine his lathe has added
Adorned with spreading clusters of pale ivy.
In the middle two figures,
Conon, and – who was the other?
Tracing the heavens for mankind with his staff,
Right time for the reaper, right time for the ploughman.
I’ve never yet put my lips to them, but kept them stored.

Damoetas: 
The same Alcimedon also made a pair for me
Handles twined round with sweet acanthus
Orpheus midst his sacred grove…
I’ve never yet put my lips to them, but kept them stored.
The artist dead two sets will triple the value of each.
Still no way you’d so praise the cups if confident of
Doubling this week’s purse.

Menalcas: 
You’ll not escape now: Let us start at Sydney’s opening bell.

Menalcas. 
Out-bid him? When have you perceived
Accurately much less predicted the market’s
Purposeful pulse? Your results are less than
Random, even worse than bad luck.

Damoetas. 
Well, then, what say we try our skill with
One million each against each? Over one week
What gain might be reached, your bets versus mine?
Loser paying winner equal to whatever difference
Between us the market does leave us.

Menalcas. 
With thieves so daring, what can masters do?
Did I not see you, rogue, in ambush lie
For Damon's Brazilian spin-off, lawyers barking?
And when I cried, "Where is he off to now?
Gather your fund close, Tityrus,"
You hid within your hedges.

Damoetas.
Was he whom I had vanquished to keep the best asset?
Which through artful bidding my wisdom had won!
You may not like it, but that Brazil nut was mine.

Menalcas. 
That must have been when they saw me slash 
Micon's IPO with my keen analysis of reserve cash.

Damoetas. 
Or here with these old blue chips, when you broke
Damon’s three year high; for you grieved
When you saw it rising and rising next,
Cross-grained Menalcas, ay, and had you not
Done some mischief, would have grieved to death.

Menalcas. 
Unhappy investors, unhappy fund! While he
Fondles Neaera, still fearing her choice
Shall fall on me, this commission broker here 
Trades twice or thrice what’s needed to claim his fees
Filching margins, from the lambs-to-slaughter their milk.

Damoetas. 
Hold! Not so loose with your jeers at true men!
We know who once dipped in what after-market –
SEC startled but looking aside – short-sellers sniggering.

          I.    ἐκλογή

Menalcas. 
Tell me Damoetas, who owns these shares? Meliboeus?

Damoetas. 
No, they are in Aegon's portfolio, just recently
Committed to my care.

All seeking equilibrium balance across their continuum
Releasing energy relative to heat pressure movement
Each responding to find some preternatural calm symmetry
Of location action connection deeper substances losing less
Broader surfaces discharging more.

Sweat’s stress and strain being widely scattered
Swept from sea to mountain to high across the plain
Riding atmospheric rivers assimilating transpiration of grass
Tree pond parking-lot puddle farmer 10K runner crook cop
Soccer-playing kid firefighter and inebriated bum.

Eklogē

Heat ascends binding a billion trillion aspirations
Morning dew sad sighs molecules of CO2 perspiration
Rising with the sun into the lower troposphere
Where vapors cool into suffusing cirrus or cumulus
Refracting and dispersing light.