467 U
½ pt Rubine Red
¼ pt Process Blue
1 ⅛ pts Yellow
28 ⅛ pts Transparent White
Six years into our marriage, I decided to paint the bedroom a pale brown. He was often away, and when we spoke on the telephone, we said “fine” and “fine.” Sometimes I forgot the shape of his nose. When he came home, I couldn’t remember how to close even the smallest distances, for instance, how to walk across the kitchen or place a cup of coffee in his hand.
What I wanted instead was a wall of sand or to fall asleep in a grain bin, something to drown in.
380 U
3 ¾ pts Yellow
¼ pt Process Blue
12 pts Transparent White
We bought our first piece of art on our honeymoon. In the artist’s house, we stood together, hip to hip, sliding open deep metal drawers to study the monoprints stored inside.
It was hard to pick a favorite. We chose a landscape marked with the silhouettes of winter trees, bare branches placed against a hillside of many purples, and the horizon turning yellow-green.
When he bent close to examine the details of the print, I touched the skin at the base of his neck. I told myself, this too belongs to me.
Of course, there was little about him that I possessed, just as I couldn’t claim, every spring, the forsythia bursting suddenly into flower beyond our window.
226 U
10 pts Rhodamine Red
6 pts Rubine Red
Today, when I fan open the formula guide in my hands, it occurs to me that, although love itself has no formula, I could match each moment of my marriage to a certain color. I might say last August was a faded blue, like a pair of blue jeans worn to softness. Or I might find a carmine and call it the weeks we stayed in Santa Fe, how the mountains blushed at sunset. There was a year made entirely of gray. I try not to speak of it, although sometimes it shadows me when I walk our neighborhood. On our wedding day, we stood beneath a chuppah sewn from tiny scraps, our faces tinged burgundy and pink, our joy the mingling of Rhodamine and Rubine Red.
317 U
½ pt Process Blue
½ pt Green
31 pts Transparent White
A month ago, we hung a new painting near our bed: a house set against a pale background that swirled uncertainly with mist.
Process Black U
How can I describe the seventh year? It was more than made entirely of gray. That year was a cloud opaque with weather. It was asphalt darkening with rain. It was ink unmixed with any other shade.
Once, during the worst of it, we argued in the night. I was sobbing, “why?” Or maybe he asked “why?” because marriage can be this as well, two people positioned in the same room, each of them talking to a wall gone almost black as a smudge of graphite pencil.
1555 U
2¼ pts Yellow
1¾ pts Warm Red
28 pts Transparent White
But there were also the peaches we bought at a roadside stand when we were twenty and twenty-one, so many years before the proposal and the wedding and all the arguments that came later, some of them almost insurmountable. Maybe he asked, “Are you hungry?” Maybe I shouted, “Look,” pointing at the wooden crates of fruit.
“O, to take what we love inside,” a poet once wrote, “to carry within us an orchard, to eat / not only the skin, but the shade, / not only the sugar, but the days.”
We shared then the intimate sweetness of a peach, his bite covering my own.
2736 U
8 pts Violet
8 pts Reflex Blue
Many afternoons for many years, I stood in the letterpress studio and spread ink across a plate of glass. It took time to mix two tints into something new, pressing the flexible edge of my knife—one side of the blade, then the other—until the pigments began to combine. First there were streaks. Rubber based inks resist giving themselves to another, as if to blend is to lose the self. After a few minutes, I could see the inks changing like a sky gone to early evening, not a loss at all but something new, the blue merging into violet and violet into blue.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine books of poetry, including most recently, Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, New England Review, and Pleiades, among others. Dubrow is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.