Colour Poem for a Painter Friend

Of all the colours of your life,
these are the wisest:
ultramarine of sea
slapping against the rocks,
sap green sliding down
the bark of a tree,
the deep terre verte
of rooted things,
sienna fingerlets on twig ends,
the cadimium red rush
of time spilling out
from a finger pricked by a rose.

Another William Carlos Williams Rip-Off

This is just to say
I have brought along
a kitchen clootie

which is untouched
by time or human hands
though I have been much tempted.

Forgive me
it reminds me of eating at your house
and having tea while waves
rock the sitooterie.

Requiem for Norman

There is a white breath in hospitals:
rattling, pulsing, misting through a plastic tube.
You never breathed like this before.
I want to put my mouth on yours
and suck that terrible white breath away.
     
What would your dark daughter have thought,
cocooned in the room's corner,
her fingers making nests,
if this old friend, this familiar stranger,
had bent over and kissed your death?

I am not eager to die myself,
not in a white room, in a white hospital,
raling white mist through a tube.
If I am given the chance, let me find a field
in green summer, a green wind blowing
a green breath into me, out of me.
I want to sigh summer as my last sentence,
and write a green period at the end.