Crayola Paradise Lost

We moved between cool cubes of crisp White after White, neatly aligned,
  topped by meticulous matrices of Indian Red,
    shielding us from the melting heat of suspended Lemon Yellow.

Fading memory conveniently omits the incessant Gray interlopers,
  puffs of wet that daily battle to deny Sky Blue its due dominance above.
    My mind relaxes in shaded memories of only richest Blue.

The tropics surprised me, too, with foliage of Sepia and Yellow Orange,
  even as the defining tapestry was a Forest Green so out-of-the-box lush,
    that the Box Itself later cried for redesign to express such riches:

Jungle Green,
  Tropical Rain Forest,
    even Mango Tango to match the gooey feel
                that danced between my sandaled toes.

A never-ending strip of White along the edge of the Universe,
  ten yards wide, glistening with myriad microscopic flecks of Silver,
    a barrier against the vast Blue Green.

Beyond that loomed a world
  comfortably out of childhood’s sight,
    and incompatible with crayon happiness.

---

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Originally published September 1, 2014 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Crayola® is a registered trademark of Crayola LLC.

Tags (from Open Salon): youth, memory, recollection, recall, memoir, remembrance, color, colorful, colour, colourful, vivid, impressions, crayola, crayons, crayola crayons, poem, poetry, panama, canal zone, panama canal zone, utopia, paradise, paradise lost, simple, simplicity, tropical, mango, jungle, ocean, beach, sand, sun, sky, rain forest

Background & Context: I took a MOOC online course called How Writers Write Poetry at the University of Iowa’s online arm, Writing University. It was a lot of fun. Most of the lectures and exercises were interesting and useful, as was the the discussion with fellow students and occasional site moderators. This is one of several poems I wrote as part of the class exercises.

They have a course coming up soon called How Writers Write Fiction. It starts Friday, September 26 and runs two months to Friday, November 21.

Memory is a fragile thing, and even those memories we intend to share are difficult to articulate. However, for better or worse, this poem above is my attempt to share some memories of my days in the Panama Canal Zone in the mid 1970’s. The photo below is cropped from a photo I got from a friend, which he represents as being, like my memories, quite old. In any case, he thought it has fallen into the public domain, though I can’t easily verify that. My memories of the simple, crisply drawn colors that characterized that lovely place and time inspired me to write the poem. The photo illustrates a little of that, and the poem hopefully gives you a sense of the full palette.

Speaking of palettes, the Crayola® collection of 64 colors from the time of my youth is something I tried to stick to in the poem. In this regard, I relied on some online lists like those in Wikipedia’s List of Crayola Crayon Colors and another that wasn't quite as complete but was easier to reference. Another offered the timeline in easy form, and still another was just visually compelling, not to mention contained useful RGB values.

A Change of Climate

I sit on a wooden bench, held by wrought iron curves in a hallway of sandstones. An antique building, lovingly refurbished in layers of creeping modernity, the mortar that probably once held these stones long since bolstered, replaced, or just newly imitated by concrete. And yet in the old style. A curvature of bricks overhead, forming an arch down the hallway. The terrace at my feet is well-worn criss-crossed stone.

It is cool in here, outside the reach of the piercing midday sun, but I can see the sky at the end of this tunnel of a hall—and through a rectangular stone opening. The blue of that distant sky beckons, beyond tall trees that seem designed to emphasize the sky’s elusive height. Wisps of cumulus clouds dart about, seeming to float higher than they belong, and yet with the occasional light cirrus streak well above that. The sky is big here, and even the tallest trees struggle to reach it. Crooked pine-like trees, unlike the pines at home, with only a few broad branches high up, not the triangles of New England pines, but more like large green dandelions or fuzzy umbrellas. Ivy works its way up part of their shafts, adding to the exotic look, but giving up the climb long before the top.

The valley stretches for miles, with row upon row of contented buildings, with their red tile roofs and distinctive walls of muted orange and sun-drunk beige. Nothing is in particularly neat lines, yet there is still a relaxed order to it all, a comfortableness perhaps borne of tradition, a peace with the pace of existence, a well-worn efficiency that I imagine to come of understanding what is necessary or beautiful to life, and what can be rightly ignored. Even where there is wear on things here, it seems less product of neglect and more just a well-earned badge of honor.

There is a timeless quality to it all, like a place that has existed in essentially this form since long before me, and that will go on this way long after. The residents are adapted to life here. They know its rhythms. They are in harmony with how things are.

I’ll miss all of that.

Not when I leave, I mean, because I could return.

But because the harmony is a property not only of the people with the earth, but the earth with the people.

And Climate Change will take all of that away, never to return.

I’m glad I saw this place before it became a desert, unable to grow olives and grapes. I’m glad I saw this place when its people were prosperous and proud.

Science is an odd thing, and hard for some to trust. But science sees things that others do not. Things in the distance, and yet not always that far distant, because we can be so very nearsighted when we wish to be.

The earth has a cancer, and cancer starts innocently, unpresumingly. If you wait until it’s obvious, it’s too late. There are those among us who would wait to fix the Climate until it’s obvious. And that will be too late.

So I’m glad I saw this place before the effect of that indifference takes hold. It was a great achievement, that easy civilization.

I will miss it. I think we all will.

Assuming any of us are even left to do so.

---

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Originally published June 11, 2014 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): extinction, cancer, death, life, desert, drought, climate change, climate, memory, beauty, beautiful view, scene, view, le santucce, tuscany, italy

The photo, titled "Tuscany Italy Countryside" by Linnaea Mallette was obtained from publicdomainpictures.net, which asserts that it is in the public domain.

Background & Context: I wrote this last week while at a writing retreat hosted by Cary Tennis at Le Santucce in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy last week. It was a beautiful place to sit and think, but devastating Climate effects will not discriminate as to venue. They'll happen everywhere and to all of us.

The URLs of the Mind

I moved a lot growing up,
so I didn't like throwing things away.
I liked collecting things—until finally
they made things stamped “COLLECTIBLE.”
The day of collecting was past.

I still collected things, but
I came to seize those days where
I caught myself throwing something out
that I hadn't expected to.
Dropping everything,
I'd furiously rush to throw away more,
before the packratishness returned.

Some things I couldn't get rid of, though.
They were reminders of times past,
pointers into a tangled web of human memory,
the URLs of the mind.

To lose them would be to lose the memory,
or perhaps just to lose the opportunity
to accidentally click through—
revisiting times past.

---

It's why we're all so confused when someone dies.

Their things seemed so important the day before.
Now we want to treat them reverently,
but we can't.
There's nothing left to access.

The value was within the person,
a human being,
human experiences.
Once open for service,
now finally closed forever to visitors.

These artifacts of experience
performed their function
only for the one (or the few) who participated
in the memory's creation,
and to whom it had been entrusted.

Gone the site of our memory,
the possessions we amass
are but 404 URLs.

---

Packrat that I am,
it's sometimes been
that I could let the thing go,
keeping just the picture.
A tinyurl.

So after traveling on business for years,
I felt sure that I was destined
to open up a little shop
to sell all those little hotel soaps
and little hotel shampoos.

I finally had to let go of that idea.
They were taking up too much space!
But first, I took a snapshot
to remember.

Such images,
though sometimes art themselves,
as keys are ephemeral.

Only I
have the password
to the protected site
where the memory lingers.

---

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Originally published October 7, 2008 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): poem, poetry, memory, remembering, photos, photographs, death, net, internet, url, tinyurl, 404, hotel soap, hotel shampoo