There is something about color that eludes definition. We put words on every color to modify it, attempt to fine-tune the description: Candy Apple Red, Teal Green.
We’ve been traveling through several of the national parks in Utah this summer, ending our trip in Logan, UT where my daughter is working. After all the browns—pinky, dusky, reddish, dusty, dirty, deep—of the high desert in places like Arches National Park, driving into Logan was an explosion of green, a welcome change.
Logan Green
Something about the green here
defies the camera. Too yellow, too dark,
not enough chartreuse, insufficiently
neon on screen. Worse in charcoals,
oils, pencil. Not Spring Green, nor
Lime, Loden, Apple, Ever. Not one.
Too many for poor cell phone tech.
Sage. Forest. Mint. Pastel. Yes—
but no—the gradient slides
away from the gaze, remains always
in motion, even under the whisper
of Leaf, Juniper, Manganese. Cupric.
How impossible to carry green memory
anywhere but in heart, where I hide it.
I carried three cameras on the trip
And let me tell you, not one of those cameras captures the colors my eyes perceive. We’ve been places where the blues were complex, milky blue, gray-blue, practically impossible to describe, and cameras did a fantastic job of catching the color. But not so in this case. The complexity is probably the root problem — no one wavelength of reflected light does the job for enough of the landscape involved. The color is not uniform enough across a large space . There are too many co-mingled together in a greenspace, including lots of yellows, browns, pinks-browns; colors that aren’t green at all.
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You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.