Green Screen

by John Rufo

Fade to green:

green sheets, greetings by green shadows, green coffee percolating in a green urn. Green ashes, green sauces, a doorknob with a green sheen. Tilt of the green world in the green atmosphere in an easy universe, beckoning jade. Appointments assembled from olives, a shoe with lime stitching, a snitch expelled from the society of green. Lavender marriages becoming

green. Widely heard “Blue in Green,” released in August, recorded in March, 1959. The green of “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” stretched to the expansive canvas of Betty Carter’s voice, sounds moving on, the green audience with green listening. The green of your eyes was a brown shade, some trees. The soil was greased with green. When the sun loomed, sending out wiry signals of diffused radiation, that too, even then

None of the stolen, extracted material billed and sold as energy could be green, although the geology certainly was. Cowards claimed in severe misnaming, but they were wrong, and they knew it, and they went ahead anyway, and we knew better too, though knowledge couldn’t keep green inside. The carbon would be captured and “stored” under the Gulf of Mexico, like winter clothes in July. The sea stormed every night, a green riot. Alan Greenspan did not deserve any of the green supposedly in his name. No mode of confinement, no torture of war, no horrible leftover legacy could generate, protect, or defend green, even if the power plant which was not like plants spun forward and tried to frighten us with its waltz. Green deferred, said no, spat back. Money pretended, and attempted to deride, the worn-out green of hands passing their touches of green, an oval hello. The mold grew up inside office buildings, throughout the bathroom walls, culled itself and flourished with stagnant water sitting pretty

It’s Euclid’s mess, but it’s not like he’s going to come back and clean it up, you know? Green never makes due with the planar, even though it spies the soul in the old geometry and laps it up. Green tigers in green dreams, a green Borges penning imaginary literary architecture with a green map, accented in lower and higher levels that, when zoomed out, have no such hierarchy, only green, green possibility. A green map of the seafloor, foamy formations, green intentions meeting green pavements to green roads, unpaved, all grass, smoked, heated, charred, burned green affairs. If it wasn’t singing and dancing, what could it even be?

Entropy and erosion couldn’t help but be green, halos allowing their earthly roots to roll over. Science fiction told green stories. A lie might be white or pinkish and that was not our place to decide

 Green wasn’t green sometimes. Not a bedtime story, not a miracle, not a soundbite, although it crisply bit down on the electricity of noses up to screens. Up to snuff, green breathing and green dust rose and fell from lungs laced with green. The news would not shine through all the greenness that was given in the emerald quality of face-to-face. Yesterday, our neighbors thumped and jumped in a green revue, a concert we heard through the vibrating walls acting as speakers. Cut loose green, too cute to be mean, deep shimmer. Who knew even mucus could be beautiful, jiggling like preserves? In a sentimental dress. Green didn’t need salvation: only a cupboard to hole up in through space-time. To survive without any necessary suffering

Jasmine, reposed, tells me how Lorca wrote: 

Verde que te quiero verde…

Ella sigue en su baranda,

Verde carne, pelo verde,

soñando en la mar amarga…

Green glasses, green notes, green that could not be recovered—it was never saved. Made good on green. Green disappearing, green in hiding, green’s comeback that you couldn’t call a comeback. Green without a name, by any other green, a secret spectacle for the ones initiated into the green. The mouth overflowing with gentle tongue whose first and only word was green But this view of green is not a lonely hue. We eat well with green, after all. A room is a room when you are tending to its configuration. When you are up inside, between yellow and blue, sometimes green is all one has, and what you got is getting over what you might imagine as relative simplicity. It’s not that green is simple surplus either, simple sugar, reductions: the philosophy and the matter collide into a concrete dream, whose green nature is movement, lively and wriggly, when summer descends into winter all of a sudden and loops back. Surely this, you may say, is the end of the line for green: the moment that it will not keep sticking, where the light will not transfer, where heat has gotten as hot as it can go. But, no, assuredly, whether or

not you have seen green and its ozone of crisscrossed distinctions, green brings itself up. A green thing that wasn’t anything else but everything else. A green movie. A green act. A green nod. Greenly, green grins. The iridescent teeth of the evening. That enormous, chance-giving, “if”