You need to know
the world used to be softer.
This new color sharpens & blinds.
When it arrived,
people crashed their cars,
stumbled hands over retinas & then
over ledges, guardrails.
Those who survived were the ones
who reached for sunglasses on instinct,
assuming the sun’s strange light despite
being early January, eight p.m,
& winter is the absence of color & light,
is blankness, is universal achromatopsia.
False assumptions nearly never save lives
& yet
& yet
the new color isn’t
a variation on anything we know,
doesn’t reflect or absorb.
It has its own shade, gradient.
It reinvents the wheel.
A group of us are going out there—
we’ll locate it, wild;
we’ll hold it in our hands.
