I see them in black and white as they wait,

severely happy, in the sunshine of Thermopylae.

As Iseult and Beatrice are always black and white.

I imagine Helen in light, not hue. In my dreams,

Nausicaa is blanched colorless by noon

and Botticelli’s Simonetta comes as faint tints of air.

Cleopatra is in color almost to the end.

Like Linda’s blondness dyed by flowers and the sea.

I loved that wash of color, but remember her

mostly black and white. Marc Anthony listening

to Hercules abandoning him listened in the dark.

In that finer time of day. In the essence, not the mode.