Hypergreen

A hypergreen lawn surrounded by trees and shrubs in strange colors and flowers in hues that are unfamiliar can look as uncomfortable as such colors would seem on a color chart.

These things didn’t happen in my life. They did happen around me; they were the meteors that landed (apparently quite often) in everyone’s hypergreen backyard but mine.

This is a place that for the writer bombilates with memories. The extraordinary woman he lived with in his twenties. Years spent on the derelict yacht they restored. The time they walked on the fish pier and agreed it was over. But never, never has the writer seen the shoreline so intense, shimmering: grass of the park hypergreen, sky hyperblue.

Without my arm prompting him to place one foot in front of the other, Brian would be standing here motionless, eyes wide. We are stopped in front of a portrait of a woman. Her hair is blonde and fine, painted in painstaking detail in the Flemish tradition. “She's a pretty girl,” says Brian. His free hand travels toward his crotch but I swat it away. I stop us in front of a Van Gogh. The hypergreen leaves at the base of the iris thrive and threaten. The grass is electrified, jutting upwards ...

But to me, the corn seemed hypergreen. It looked unnatural. What corn and sorghum we'd raised when I was a kid had survived on our scant rainfall. Without irrigation, seeds had to be planted farther apart so that they could compete for moisture. Looking at a cornfield then, I'd seen as much gray dirt between the stalks as I had emerald green. Our old, dryland, prechemical approach had more in common with the way I'd seen Hopi Indians farm than it did with our present methods.