Color Creeps Back In: Images Of An Icy Winter Stream

These are images of a stream that I cross over every morning on my way to school. I noticed that the photos I was taking were no longer black, white and shades of grey, and this series, taken two days apart, was part of the impetus for the poem "Color Creeps Back In" that I wrote:

color creeps back in

gradually

shades of grey

begin to have hints of pastel pinks

and purples
the heart tingles
waking up from being asleep

The effect moods have on one's perception of the world is powerful. Medications can also have a marked effect. When writing the poem, I also had in mind this passage from Kay Redfield Jamison's 1995 memoir on living with bipolar illness, _An Unquiet Mind_:

After discussing it with my psychiatrist in Los Angeles and my doctor in London, I did, very slowly cut back on the amount of lithium I was taking. The effect was dramatic. It was as though I had taken bandages off my eyes after many years of partial blindness. A few days after lowering my dose, I was walking in Hyde Park, along the side of the Serpentine, when I realized that my steps were literally bouncier than they had been and that I was taking in sights and sounds that previously had been filtered through thick layers of gauze. The quacking of the ducks was more insistent, clearer and more intense; the bumps on the sidewalk were far more noticeable; I felt more energetic and alive.

I had been thinking of Jamison's analogy of 'sights and sounds that previously had been filtered through thick layers of gauze' when I wrote my line 'your body swathed in cast padding.' I wanted to evoke the same image of everything traveling through layers of cotton, and cast padding has an association with immobility for me, of being frozen, paralyzed. I also think cast padding is slightly more specific medical terminology than gauze, and I like that my immersion in the language of veterinary medicine seeps through into my poetry-- technical medical language is a part of me, my vocabulary-- I am steeped in it.

I was also thinking of a piece I had read by Ariel Gore in Ms. magazine in the '90s. She writes, in "Intimacy":

I'll wear white like the bright bone of my promise. I'll speak in whisper, wear blue and blend into the dawn. I'll walk tall, wear red so the blood won't show.

Something about the way she used color to emphasize her intent struck me, the way different colors are linked to and can signify different emotions. Writing poetry isn't always like that for me, but there are times when other, better, writers' words echo through my head when I am writing and I co-opt, revise and incorporate them into my own writing.