Qualia

The blueness of blue,
The youness of you.
I thought it was sky
But it really is sun,
The dazzling blue
That strikes my eyes through;
It’s light from the sun
That’s soaked in and spewed.
How blue is the sky?
How blue is the sea?
How deep and how bright
Is the blueness today?
It’s bluer than true,
It’s truer than due,
In light of the shadow
That crosses my heart
(The shadow falls longer
Than what had first cast it:
The smallest most limited
Inkling of you).
What blue do you see?
The same blue as me?
And how do I know
That your blue is like mine?
For what I call burgundy
You may call green,
And orange to you
May not be what I mean.
Do you see yourself
The way I see you?
When I see your youness
In all that you do?
You’re special and dazzling
And strike me right through.
I can’t think of you without
Clouding my heart,
So little by little I learn to restart.
But I think the world
Won’t forget you so soon,
If they should all see you
The way they see sky.
And every day newer
You’re every day youer,
And no one is youer than you,
Nobody else is you.

Reading 'The Great Gatsby' in Beijing

Perhaps no work of fiction has returned to me more often over the past eight years in China than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slippery tale of James Gatz of North Dakota. I’ve stood in Shanghai, bathed in the lights of a new skyline, and thought of Gatsby’s glimpse of New York, with “the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps.”

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