I'd like to take a glass of water.
The review still came out of my medical experience.
I wasn't unable to do so until 1964
when I wrote the poem called "Pathology of Colors."
But perhaps I can begin by reading this one.
"I know the color rose, and it is lovely,
but not when it ripens in a tumor;
And healing greens, leaves and grass,
so springlike in limbs that fester are not springlike.
I have seen red-blue tinged with hirsute mauve
in the plum-skin face of a suicide.
I have seen white, china white almost,
stare from behind the smashed windscreen of a car.
And the criminal, multicolored flash of an H-bomb is no more
beautiful than an autopsy when the belly's opened--
to show cathedral windows never opened.
So in the simple blessing of a rainbow,
in the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirror, I have seen,
visible Death's artifact like a soldier's ribbon on a tunic
tacked."