The Other Color

With an inhalation of breath and mind he realized
He had always found it effortful to depict
And portray the apperception of the paints
And the ethos of the ink to another
Individual who had wandered out of room.

But they were not out of mind, and the premise
To call their presence nearer was an undeniable
Determinant in his whirling to look behind him,
Finding nothing but the morning dust lurking like
A ghost that had misplaced its haunting.
But the dust offered no criticism, response,
Or interpretation. He turned back to his work,
And the music that eavesdropped on his inspiration
Traipsed on, changing tracks.

That was when the color came into conception.

The ashen blue hues were singed by coral cinders,
With streaks of cinnamon strokes chilled by cerulean streams.
But his work needed another. When he went around the
Color wheel the hue he envisioned on his painting seemed
Of a dissimilar tone and texture.

It was strange to him how the color enveloped
Him, his mind, and was much simpler to focus on;
Arresting his attention like nudity in its most
Desirous form. But it had no curves or figure
For his eyes to latch onto— only a gradual tone throughout.
When he envisaged himself in his vagary he could see
The tint reflected in his pores and nervous beads of sweat.

It was another color.
Not of the primary, secondary, or tertiary families.
It was a color that was found in the instant
Water doused a fountain of flames.
It was a tone only visible the milliseconds
A meteor shower splashed across the sky;
A hue only seen the fleeting moment
Glances met each other's dried eyes.
But how to make it?

His hand had already retrieved the crusted palette
Bringing life in the form of swamp muck
That the fibers of the brush imbibed like artificial roots.
Small circles he told himself, mulching his
Molars in an inherent quirk for soothing stress.

He interwove sage and crimson, synthesizing sienna.
He dabbed an abysmal blue, but stopped swirling circles.

The color was neutral, and he exhibited a raw form
Of despondency on not achieving the vibrancy
He could picture. The brush retracted with his hand
And his brow bunched as he slumped in thought
That the color wasn't attached to any
Tone known. But clearly he could render it
Smeared across the wallpaper and drying
Under his translucent fingernails, as if he had
Carelessly eased it onto the easel
And into the crevices of the canvas.

He shivered, then called out like a bird
Unconcerned with the quality of its timbre.

"Ian, are you still here?" he called, his voice cracking.
The music played in hopeful muted notes,
Over which was heard Ian's familiar intonation.

"What you need?"

The song erupted into a glissando of glissades.
The color in his mind's eye corrupted and overwhelmed
His chromatic perception of the surrounding room,
Obscuring the objects and space around him
In a monochrome filter of itself that glistened
With a glimmer similar to dawn and sunset.
He turned to the figure entering the living space
With the face of a fawn hunted by headlights.

Ian pronounced his name, then enunciated it,
But the artist's concentration was on the blissful,
Glinting texture of the music as it subsided
And subsequently the monochrome gamut receded,
Obfuscating the tints and shades from further view.
The embrace of an ambrosial tide left the room.

Ian mouthed his name again, and he shook his head out of its dither.
His friend's facial expression gestured 'what?'

"You don't see the color do you?"

Ian's lower lip dug into the top one, as his head
Swiveled back and forth in indication of no, he hadn't.

There was a sigh exchanged between acquaintances
As he roused a former rumination. But Ian was not
Out-of-room or out-of-mind, yet certainly lacking in sight.
Leering at the strokes of the watercolors as they passed shoulders,
He sensed tension; the purpose of the paint was now tainted.