A New Color

Originally posted on 10/28/12.

How to explain a new color?
How to define it beyond calling it
a crisp, refractive purple
only visible behind my eyes?

I sit in my driveway 
thinking of two women
panhandling in the rain at the end of our street
at the start of a hurricane, 

and of how
to explain this color 
I know I have
never seen before.

I asked them 
if they had a place to go.
One smiled and the other said,
“Thank you, bless you sir.”

I’m sitting in my driveway
looking at a color
with closed eyes, 
resting my head on the steering wheel.

Looking at a color I’ve never seen,
a clear and crisp refractive purple
in the crazed, urgent, irregular form
of a paper flower or a crumbling gem.

This is the color
of a blessing or a mercy,
the color of driving back down the hill
to take them to a shelter,

the color of shame when they refuse
to get in my car,
the color of understanding
why they refuse;

the color of a subsequent prayer
for them, the color of feeling
that I have not given enough,
to them, or maybe to anyone.