Poetry
And Then More White
Mark Johnston
(For Susan Shutan)
White can bash you, floor you in a spot
of blond brashness, curdle you like cream
until you’re made to dream of bleach.
Beach sand, too, can cover you
like a gritty storm, the wasp-waist of time’s
glassy miraculous ivory, pouring.
I dream of continents of albumen,
storms of pearl with windows winking.
I conjure sun-dried femurs, gelid
whites of eyes, wood torn into white
by light and water and time. Oh, let me be hail!
Let me be clouds of sleet and sea-foam!
Let me run my pale fingers through
the rigorous white of the priest’s robes.
Let me handle rice and woolly lambs and shrouds,
fall in an avalanche of eggs and cloud.
Let me flash blindly in albino-light, flow
like an acid ghost through stiffened cream.
Frost can shackle me in its drafty manacles;
coffles of stars and moths can ring
my bland ankles that tend toward paper-color.
Bone be my scepter, vin blanc my only drink.
Grant me the negative temperament
of the ice that locks and mimics the mastodon’s eye.
Let me be sheathed in underbelly of python.
Let me bower myself in flurries of snow and daisies.
Give me teeth, give envelopes, give milk.
Give me blind white, devil white, flash white, seed white,
sheet white, rind white, dead white, moon white.
And white, and white, and white, and white, and then more white.