Oleander Leaves
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 43: "To sit there in your tattered stage clothes and take a drag off your imaginary cigarette and say, 'Well, shall we go?' 'Yes, let’s go.' And then not move."
I picked these leaves up off the ground in the Luxembourg Gardens the other day, where the gardeners were trimming the potted oleanders. I took them back to my apartment and set them on the wooden table next to a shiny brown chestnut and some pieces of its broken shell.
In the dark of the early morning I have started to spill the plastic bag of oil paints out onto the kitchen counter where the light is strongest. I don’t mix them in advance anymore, but do so right there on the palette with a brush. I don’t need those big piles of color the way I once did. I don’t need everything planned out, just to look, and see— the blue, the yellow, the red within the non-color, the unnameable colors that make up all the colors around us, all the grays and muddied reds or greens, the blues that are not really blue but violet, brown, a slurry color that reads as blue, and then, when all put together, describe a green plum with violet wax bloom and a blush of apricot.
