At 3AM sometimes I found the man sittingbleached in the light from the forecast on TV.There are no names for colors, he said,the first time he spoke to me,outside the visual spectrum. What is orangebut a conspiracy of resolution? A memory now,dry as his faded signature on the DNR.Mystery of the ocular vehicle found,he told me, vision is nothing but a trickof the eye, a radiance absorbed or deflectedoff the surface of a thing, a photon, forgedin the sun’s core travels hundreds of thousandsof years to surface, and eight minutes to your eyeit collapses. A fraction of a blink betweenhis voice and my disremembrance of it.Once, sometime later, sittingin a stained-glass gallery suffused with light,his brother came to the reading and showed mephotos he removed from an albumbook,and I watched the sepia past, washedin a chemical bath expose a sharpness of detail,a variety of color, as the sleeveswere added to and subtracted from
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash