Poetry Thursday--SYNAESTHESIA

I, WASCA


1 Dancing Across My Own Brain

Marvelously I see my splitself
walking and dancing
across my own brain. My brain,
round as a stage, floods
with color, as if someone
outside my head were drawing
swaths of richly colored silk
across the stage lights. Color
pulses inside my ears. It is blue
as music which soars, then pales
where the brightest gold
floods singing through my eye sockets

then seeps into the ruby
of my upper brain.

2 How a White Ballet Flooded Yellow

Lately I began to see a shade
of color which I had never
seen before. Yellow.

Yellow shimmers
before bursting
from the proscenium as woodwinds.

Yellow, the color proper
pools, recedes, puddles
into petals of tainted poppies.

I tend to it with these iridescent
fingers that are forming from yellow fire
flaming into hands, all flaming

into fingers smoking and twisting
into body, sprouting legs
that arabesque to yellow music
...

3 Clue Into a Schizophrenic Mind

Someone tells me
"Wasca, your insane brother
Stanislaw died yesterday
in Russia, incinerated
into grey ash
in the fire that consumed
his madhouse."
I think: Stanislaw.
And yellow blooms inwardly
as I see my brother and I
run laughing through childhood.

The dance begins, a kaleidoscope
of colors, of sounds, of smells.
We dance in our red boots
for the first time at the great fair
in Ninji Novgorod. All the sights
all the sounds, the perfumes
flood me yellow, bells ringing,
the taste of Turkish Delight on my tongue,
turn, on pointe, fade blue
as I watch Stanislaw leaving St. Petersburg
with father. Stanislaw is young,
and a squiggle of jade spirts
as if squeezed from a tube, pirouettes
until blue sees brother sitting in the madhouse
with his vacant, dark eyes and open mouth.
The color of brother flashes blue
and brother spins, flapping and squawking:
"I burn,
I burn,
God, kill the fire!"
Stanislaw burns. All colors rage
into the silver tributaries of my cortex.
Unable to concentrate on fire,
on silver, or blue, or yellow, or green,
my mouth smiles while my brother burns
and burns
inside my eyes.

--excerpts from I, WASCA by Maryan Paxton