What if your age were visible by color,
the beginning of a life a deep infrared crimson
      the color of birth and heat
the end, a near ultraviolet
      the color of Easter and everafter particles and waves
      (take your pick)?

What if you could read the path of a life
through time
find every place
where someone has been by the luminous volume they've left behind
as a trail
photons for breadcrumbs and threaded unwinding
with every breath
through everywhere their body has ever occupied?

A child holds his hand out the summer car window running
      cross country
and his palm skims the fluid air,
flat stone on smooth lake,
his delicate fingers extrude
ribbons red as ripe apples in black spacetime,
his bodypath is a neon stretch of his shadow.
The ribbons ripple on every gust of wind
and stay that way
      as long or late as we would
care to read them.

You could track a life.
Find the busy parts where all the light converges
unreadably mixed
near-hued or verging on white
filling a livingroom up to the walls
      tall as a man
glowing brighter on the couch or where the favorite easy chair was,
to the bedroom
and finding the pool of light that tells
      where the bed was
      and which side was preferred, almost
one third of a person's glow is spent in bed,
a very bright place for the homebody.

But if you tracked a wanderer?
Long thin rays where she traveled only once
or a slightly brighter path for a few returns
all pure colors undiluted by a mixture of ages.
      There's that long loop that runs from airport to airport,
      that single orange path over Canada and the Atlantic to Spain
and back, various altitudes,
      dents in the spine from navigation changes,
a few knots in the path at the destination;
a hobo sleeps over the rails, no collection of light like in bed
      but in switchyards, a drunkard's walk,
      shuffled, let out on sidings;
the recreational traveler
self-conscious that his path could be traced
would travel the long way through cloverleafs:
      "Oh, man... I did that when I was puce green,
      late twenties or so.
      You can tell by the way I moved my legs
      I was deep into conceptualism."

People of similar age would gather in numbers,
march in formation
to spell frivolities with the color in their wake.
An amber "Hi, Mom!" the size of a cornfield
or a deep blue, "Sex is better when you're retired."
Or a graffitoed aqua beside that,
      "... as if sex matters."

You could read this best from the sky
with the tourists.
Their contrails would be white anyway,
all colors
all ages of people in the planeload.

But there would be points
when, fate immanent
the trail would change to deep violet:
      Kamikazes, magnificent purple streaks divebombing;
      Lockerbie, an ultraviolet sky show;
      the Challenger, a sixteen story supersonic mortar,
six swipes of indigo launching off the spectrum
in ninety seconds.
Now, those were fireworks.

Could lovers read their own hues, what then?
Preconscious of tragedy, our colors unmatching,
      would we board those planes?
Young, unmarried,
      would we even pass each other rings?
Would we see our newborns
swathing teal-colored fists at four months old
      and sink in surrender to unmastered medicine?
Would our cities,
      warring, blue-shifted,
march as stridently down their boulevards toward destiny?

We would have to embrace the myths that
      Fate was blind but certain, that
      Bravery or Strength did not know our timecolor, and that
      Bliss had no memory for pictures.
That,
or blindness for ourselves
      would be the only tolerable life.