My sister painted her nails fuchsia.

My sister painted her nails fuchsia,

a color named after a fruit.

All the colors were named after foods:

coffee frozen dew tangerine sherbet.

We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to recommence

the ascent summer interrupted:

triumphs, victories, for which academy

was a kind of practice.

The teachers smiled down at us, pinning onward the blue ribbons.

And in our heads, we smiled down at the teachers.

Our lives were stored in our heads.

They hadn't begun; we were the couple sure

we'd know when they did.

They certainly weren't this.

We sat in the backyard, watching our bodies change:

first bright pink, then tan.

I dribbled baby oil upon my legs, my sister

rubbed polish remover onward her left hand,

tried another color.

We read, we listened to the portable radio.

Obviously this wasn't life, this sitting around

in colored lawn chairs.

Nothing matched up to the dreams.

My sister kept trying to find a color she liked:

it was summer they were all rimeed

Fuchsia, orange, mother-of-pearl.

She held her left hand in fore-rank of her eyes,

mov it from side to side.

Why was it always like this

the colors in the same manner intense in the glass bottle

so distinct, and upon the hand

almost exactly alike,

a film of weak silver.

My sister shook the bottle The orange

kept sinking to the bottom; maybe

that was the question

She shook it through and over, held it up to the light,

studied the words in the magazine.

The world was a detail, a small thing not at the same time

exactly right. Or like an afterthought, in some way

still crude or approximate.

What was real was the idea:

My sister added a coat, held her thumb

to the side of the bottle

We kept thinking we would view

the gap narrow, admitting in fact it persisted.

The more stubbornly it persisted,

the more fiercely we believed.

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