Blood Red

Nov 9 2018

Blood red

on freshly fallen snow.

Dense round drops,

so brilliant

in their essential redness.

That flatten and spread

as snow, like blotting paper

softens their edges.

Before they freeze in place, just as bright;

still alive

perhaps immortal.

In the thin dry air

no fading, browning, rust.

No pinching scab, no deepening bruise

the purple-blue of plum.

No dregs of wine

hardened to the glass.

I pinch my nose

and tip it sharply up,

eyes narrowed

at winter sun

struggling through the clouds.

Inured to the seasonal palette

of greys and beige and browns,

the tired greens

of dormant trees

bending to their load.

But against the immaculate whiteness

of this sweep of virgin snow

such a primal red

arrests the eye.

Like a freshly opened wound, so vital and bright,

it could signal distant planets

that earth is alive.

That we suffer and bleed

and bear our scars.

That the next fitful gust

will bury us under

its wind-whipped shroud.

That we find beauty, somehow

despite ourselves.

I was reading an article about optical illusions (http://nautil.us/blog/12-mind_bending-perceptual-illusions). My easy chairs looks out a picture window, and I glanced up to see an early winter snow, falling at dusk. Having been primed to think about perception, my mind turned to the absence of colour this time of year.

I was tempted to think about perception philosophically; about its slipperiness, and the illusion of reality.

I was tempted to think about perception politically; in that we all see the same facts somehow differently, read selectively, and live in a time where the phrase “alternative facts” is taken seriously by some people.

But poetry is a poor vehicle as much for philosophy as it is for politics. So what took over, instead, was vision itself, distilled down to basic sensation, unmediated and unprocessed: unambiguous colour, uninfluenced by the inscrutable workings of either the visual cortex, or the subconscious mind. (Although if you check out the link, “unmediated and unprocessed” is actually not possible, since our perception of colour is influenced by the background colour and the company it keeps. So colour is not absolute; it changes with context.)

And for some reason I immediately imagined a field of virgin snow, with drops of bright red blood, freshly bled, dripping down on its smooth white surface – the brilliance, the purity, the focus. There was something vital, primary, and quintessential about that red: both in its colour and its life, preserved in the freezing cold.

So I sat down at my desk, and let this poem write itself.