palau.

I paint Palau in watercolor,
bluegreengoldenred melting, seeping into one another,
intertwining into new and rare patterns
of perfect

red of the dirt
(Martian-moonscape, howling, lonely Canyonlands-mesatop dirt)
runs red in the rain,
our hillside bleeding down down down into the sea

gold is for sunshine,
those glistening moments of good
as giggles ring through the schoolyard
as we jump jump and do the splits, splits, over the bridge and—
we collapse into laughter, cannot finish,
fall and laugh and start again,
as the golden rays kiss our faces,

floating down out of that cloudless, endless, Robin’s-egg-Dear-Prudence sky
I admire it from my mesa top,
stretch up up with all my might
as though maybe, just maybe, if I reach just far enough I can grab that perfect blue and hold it in my hand, for keeps.
around me, the sky darkens to a deep, majestic shade as it stretches (like me!)
out over the serene azure sea—
and I’m quickly running out of words, of language
for all the shades of beautiful before me.

and green! there’s another—
somehow kelly, hunter, lime—
the old standbys pale inadequately when faced with the momentous task of embodying a landscape of Serengeti trees and Japanese mist and and George of the Jungle vines and Dr. Seuss mountains
(you know the kind, almost friendly-looking, with a single tree growing out of the top at an almost comically sideways angle, to the point where, looking at it—every time!—you wonder, with a mix of jealousy and wonder, how the hell it can balance there like that anyway?)

yet we can’t forget the most brilliant watercolor of all,
the pinkorangeredpurple fireworks of sunset,
as the dying sun lights the sky and sea on a fire,
a grandiose last gesture on its (nightly) road to dusty death.
at first, the whole canvas is ablaze—
(our kelly-lime-hunter vegetation reduced to black silhouettes in its shadow)
yet then the picture changes—form, color, tone—by the second,
until slowly, slowly the sun dies away,
leaving only a few slow-burning embers in remote corners
as a remembrance to itself,
and then—
nothing.
we are left wrapped in the black velvet sky
and the promise of tomorrow’s masterpiece.