The Colour of Love

“Sir, you’re a philosopher. Tell us, what is the colour of love?”
- Office banter.

For once, I’m bereft of answer. She waits,
expectant, an ordinary face unlimned
by philosophic doubt, testing an oracle.
For once, I’ve no absolutes, no named
axiom to arrest the air, no historical
truth to flourish with place and dates.

But were I to lay my own soul bare
(forgetting for an instant my place
on the hill), would I say:
love’s colour is the fairness of a face
softly glimpsed against the grey
of a pallid sky, and wet streaked hair…

The tint of a poem long ago, remembered
as sienna on green matted parchment,
a haunting tendril of promise:
would I dwell on that rapture’s moment
when certitudes dissolved in a kiss,
now long since embered?

Or the shade of bookshop light, subtle
as it picks a dreamt-of gift: a book of Fowles,
Eliot’s Cats fondly asked, Catullus for the cover
(a private tease), a morning’s spoils
hugged in the transport of a lover…
Yet all this, I fear, would tell you little.

But wait – what of the gold of the mountain sun,
of blues and browns, a butterfly in filigreed
silver, bangled jade like wrought pools,
a Tibetan crone mulcting me in cheerful greed,
seeing love’s lustre in a fool’s
eyes…And I’d still not be done.

For there is one last, the final sea of hues
where all rainbows merge, and this by far
the most lasting, answer most right.
For this reigns in crippling power,
the certainty of love bleached white
by the lover’s abuse.

*****