28
Fact-Simile
David Wanczyk
An Exercise in Red: Parallel Texts Is it my colorblindness that gives red little meaning to me? I see it faintly, yes, but it occurs to me that I see everything faintly, that shades affect me only as if words. I wish I could dream in color, or hear red in some small synesthesia, the darker the maroon, the deeper the note, way below middle C, foreboding like blood. Red is the number five but no day of the week as green is both Friday and eight. Red is a letter, though no redletterday. Red is S, anaphora, flash, never my favorite, never the underdog. But if I can dream you, red, hear you deeply, taste your element, and get my arms around you, then I can remember her as more than a stillframe flicker, a spritz of something or other. My memory is one sense at a time and I blame you, red, (or are you green?) the way you resist my hearing, my touch, warmth only by association.
This is an interrogative sentence positing a mild affliction. A line break. This is an admittance of a worldview which is not particularly literal. Color is a construction of language. This is a tone shift into a pleading for a richer subconscious life. N: A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. . .Writer is embarrassed by this blood simile, though feels that a day of the week and a number are green. This is a joke about a cliché. This is anaphora. This is a slander of red as too trendy. This is another tone shift, unearned, in which writer, perhaps disingenuously, wishes to sense red in various ways. This is a confusing pronoun. “Her” is no one in particular. “Spritz” is too informal for the tone, but sums up the ineffectiveness of writer’s memory. (This is a reminder of posited Colorblindness). This is an appositve ending, poetic swill. A Column
Break. My bible, The New American Edition, another appositive, a line break, my first car, a Mercury Topaz, thirtytwo squares of a checker board, passion, war, Ares, metaphor, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Gertrude Stein, a 1994 movie nominated for best director, a can of Barq’s I’ve kept as a memento of something I can’t remember that sounds like ginger. Writer is embarrassed by this simile of synesthesia. S. Flash. Monday is almost red. An ant, an ouch, an anaphora. Apples, onions, peppers, rum, eyes, hair, and noses. Dawns, ferns, planets suns, devils, squares, and roses. That one shirt of hers that I can’t seem to forget (because I wrote about it once) no matter how hard I try, no matter how many days go by. The red pen on an over-rhyming poem, green eyes, green backs (under red shirts). The red of a fire smells like memory lost, poetic she and the spritz of her.