Secondary Colors

The wine was a bargain, ten dollars of lies

in a bottle that promised a deep, oaky finish.

It tastes like copper and the way the day dies

when you realize your options start to diminish.

I nudged the glass and the maroon flood ran

across the white pages of the library loan.

It’s a book on the desert, on the history of man,

now mapped with a stain of a dark, wet zone.

It spreads like a bruise in the fiber and thread,

a permanent mark of a clumsy, lone night.

I’ll have to pay for it. The things that we’ve bled

rarely wash out when we turn on the light.