All the Colors One Can Hold

There is little you can do to control the direction of a hot air balloon, floating its way along the yawning skies of a foreign countryside.

Take in the colors that way, absorbing the palette as it seeps across your panorama, as it glows from dusk into day.

And on the colorless day, the one that starts with the blue-black cold, you hold those invincible colors from before.

You dangle them from the ceiling like paper maché globes, a menagerie of invincibility. Your colors are your armor. They remind you of Freire's truth, that "to exist humanly is to name the world, to change it." Green, in your new geography. Yellow in your southwestern field. Roseglow, above all, suspended.

There, you smile the sun into the day. You stretch it about inside yourself like a pliable ball of dough. You shape your sailboat, an earth-to-sky flying machine. Drawing the masts and cords as strings through your fingers. And in your sanctuary from the clouds, you dwell in all the colors one can hold. And you voyage from nowhere to somewhere.