From the Magpie (Colors)

Sunflowers, Beyoncé, Orlando, bodies in hot magenta light.

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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The petals of the sunflowers in my room are a saturated yellow-orange with almost imperceptible lines of green, like the darts in a dress, seaming them from base to tip. The thick, prickly, dull green stem lightens to a more delicate and tentative green where it braces the open flower. The shade of yellow of the sunflower petals rhymes almost identically with the shade of yellow of Beyoncé’s flouncy dress in her visual album Lemonade, the dress she wears as she gaily beats the hell out of a street with a baseball bat. Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you.

Both of those yellows, of course, are the yellow of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, Van Gogh who wrote to his sister, “One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well,” in the days that he was living intensely with Gauguin in the Yellow House in Arles and his vision exploded from the somber to the psychedelic. I heard a young African-American man singing the line Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you on the crowded street outside the Apollo Theater, a sidewalk that was lined with purple glyphs because the marquee announced a tribute to Prince, whose cartoon grape shade of purple is now indelibly linked with his death. The glyphs leaned against the building like surreal, funereal flowers.

I am the Magpie and these are the bright snippets I collected this week, these strands of color. Can one speak poetry just by arranging colors well? The poetry of what? Rilke wrote that Cezanne demonstrates that “painting is something that takes place among the colors” and that we must “leave them completely alone so that they can come to terms among themselves.” This week, they seemed to be holding a parliament.

On my Facebook feed, squares of rainbow flags with the words WE ARE ORLANDO interspersed with entirely black squares. Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you. Van Gogh committed suicide not terribly long after Gauguin left him. Many years later, Gauguin painted sunflowers with eyes. The brown seeds at the center of each sunflower in my room are closely packed together, but, if you look closely, you can see that they are arranged in whorling rows, like the patterns in a head of hair. In order to envision the sunflower as an eye, the seeds would have to be the pupils and the petals the lashes; the eyes would be perpetually open, staring up at the sun.

In every subway station, the eyes of the characters on Orange Is the New Black stare out from a grid, the image of each face so closely cropped that it’s very difficult to tell whose eyes they are. On the first episode, sunflowers waved from the warden’s desk, and covered the remains of a corpse. On the prisoners, the telltale orange, or the supernaturally dull beige: colors that are hard to miss.

What are the stakes of being a color that’s hard to miss? Omar Mateen asked if there were “any black people” hiding in the bathroom of the Pulse nightclub, and said he didn’t want to kill any of them because they had “suffered enough.” If you were hiding in a stall that night, what color would you say you were? What color are you right now? Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you. Who sings that when, where, to whom, and in what shade of yellow or orange or beige or black?

In a gallery on the Bowery, wild, surreal colors transfigure naked bodies in the photographs of Jimmy DeSana, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1990, at forty. In one image, a man in underwear and boots straddles a wall with his hairy ass hanging out, the scene suffused in a hot magenta light. In another, legs in floral-printed stockings are upended against a bathtub wall, an iguana climbing one leg, the entirety lit by shades of chartreuse. These are images from DeSana’s 1970s and early 1980s Suburban series, shot in Connecticut houses bathed in what might be the light from New York City’s punk and S&M clubs where DeSana had done much of his other work. DeSana’s colors are hard to miss, the psychedelic flag of his sensibility transplanted from one environment to a radically different one, his vision transforming it, upending its stated purpose.

Meaning shimmers, profuse. Is chartreuse the color of a body’s transformation into an object? Is yellow the color of revenge? Is purple the color of erotic royalty? Is the rainbow flag the slightly saccharine array of colors of an emerging brand or is it, flying half-mast in Provincetown, the sign of the site of atrocity and, now, a defiance of genocide? In my magpie way, I can’t help but notice that Orlando rhymes with Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of pan-gender, pan-sexual, immortal fluidity, her love letter to Vita Sackville-West. Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you.

Which is, by the way, a goodbye song. Orlando was a breakup letter as well. All the colors of the rainbow are the colors of mourning this week, all the poetry is elegy. Vision shatters. Gaze at the bright yellow sunflowers ornamenting the room and every street corner market in the city. Look again, and you might see all their perpetually open eyes, looking at you.