The Seer

The man was white, grey and pale brown, the colorless colors of a used-up earth where water has sunk down, sunk down so low and risen so far above the grey-white pale-brown heaven and shrunk so far within itself that it will not come back. What can moisten a shriveled water, or can a clod of ash regain colors from the identical howl of a white powder sun? Not in me, he said, ever again, but in the street with engine and worker petals, not papery, more fragile than that, there will be color. My eye will reach color, all colors, every one together, which no one will see in me ever again. I turned to the sky then and it was all one blue, the color of seeing, and yet was as many blues, as subtle, as tones of stubble in the most sunken cheek.