Poetry by L.I. Henley
1. I think the answer has just left me,
that I had it but spilled
the cream, wanting too much at once,
something about the always absent word I reach for
in a divine moment or how there are nothing
but divine moments, beads of cream on the waxy-green
tablecloth, or how all retellings of green
are the crayon’s smear of greenness
and not the one you saw as the first camper
awake at dawn, the ferns still lapping azure pools of darkness,
that fragile architecture that keeps me
leaning to look more closely.
2. Disappointment—do you remember?—of taking all ten
of your prized paints and swirling them
together, that unnamed color akin to baby shit,
the lesson of more not equating to better, that love
is an eyedropper and also a firefighter’s hose. When it happened,
did you become thrift with color, with love?
With how many names you would cup in prayer?
3. In trying to name the blueness that holds us,
I called it spirit. I called it power. What my friends were told
to call faith, I had no need to name, loving instead
the wildness of uncertainty, sudden wind that shook the cottonwoods,
lifted my skirt and touched me, a blue feeling I didn’t own,
was never sure would come back.
4. “It is the best possible sign of a color when nobody who sees it
knows what to call it,” said John Ruskin.
When the light came on, I was unable to name the shade of red
our bodies had made. There were so many layers to it.
Neither could the boy who wanted to know
why I’d let it happen. Why didn’t I know I was going to bleed
all over his mother’s bone-white sheets.
Why didn’t I know my body housed an assaulting red,
color provocateur, thief of white.
5. Church hymns, I’ve read, are full of descriptions of
the heavens, and hardly ever mention the actual color
of the sky. But I was raised a heathen. Sunday mornings
were spent with my father running errands. My favorite
was the hardware store with its bins of silver washers—
flat, toothed, square—the bins of nuts shaped like acorns and castles,
my hands considering what makes a color
warm or cool. The screws with their ovular heads
were decidedly cool, dipped in color I had no word for
and so heard music instead, a one-note “ah” that might beam from a hole
in a veil of cloud, an electric blue maybe or whatever color
electricity makes or every other spark that flies from a welder.
6. The universalists say color is rooted in our biology,
and all I know is that my hand would swim all the way to the bottom
of the bin, my arm buried to the elbow with screws,
my cobalt blood never more at home
than when I stood in aisle ten of the hardware store.
Best still were the paint chips in the interior décor
section: Blue Bell, Rainwater, Chiffon,
Parchment. I felt a deep yearning to eat them,
especially the blues, Robin’s Egg dripping from my lips.
7. Ruskin saw the ineffable as sacred. Did it go both ways?
Let me be astonished then, awake too early, alone in a warm
kitchen, tongue lapping the spilled blueness of heavy cream,
let me lean further into an understanding of what light does
and blink—and miss it.
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, her books include Starshine Road: Poems (2017 Perugia Press Prize) and the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through. Currently, she’s writing personal essays about illness, love, and the Mojave Desert, which have appeared in Brevity, The Southeast Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Fourth Genre, The Los Angeles Review, and The Mississippi Review. She teaches English composition at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Visit her at lihenley.com.