Most poems about conversation hand us the words that were said. Peter Menkin hands us their color. From the first line, speech is something the eye can follow: words "come out color," taking the shape of a "round circle of blue / like the clear Caribbean sea." The scene is a summer evening, a man and a woman talking as the light changes, and the poem's central idea is that talk like this, unhurried and friendly, naturally moves toward the subject of endings. By the last line the speakers are "admitting mortality," and the sky they have been colouring with their words has turned white.
The poem's shape does much of this work. There is no rhyme scheme and no steady metre. The lines run short and loose, closer to the pace of real talk than to a formal verse pattern. The most striking feature is the handful of single-word lines: "visible," "this," "light," "ours," "dimensions." Each sits alone on the page like a pause in a conversation, or like a swatch of paint set down before the next stroke. They also create small ambiguities. "Ours" hangs between "the green trees" and the "tall challenge at day's end," so we can't be sure whether the speakers are claiming the trees or the challenge. That loose grammar suits a conversation that wanders and doesn't need to be tidy.
The imagery follows a clear path through the day. It begins with blue and the "clouded sky," moves to the green of the trees as sunset changes them, and then flares into "radiant orange enlarging / between a man and woman." The last colour is the "white sky," which is no colour at all. Read in order, the palette is a slow loss of intensity, from the saturated blue of the sea to a blank, pale end. The verbs support this. Light is "changing" the trees and the orange is "enlarging," so everything is in motion. The phrase "held together by sunset" is quietly paradoxical, since a sunset is itself something passing away. The speakers' lives are pictured as held together by the very thing that is ending.
The title promises "Color and Sound," yet the poem delivers almost entirely color. Sound survives only in the words "speaking," "conversation" and "speak." That seems deliberate. The poem turns hearing into seeing and so makes the unseen visible, and the same move is made with death. Mortality is the one abstract word in a poem otherwise built from concrete things like sea, sky and trees. It arrives in the final two lines, which are longer and steadier than what came before: "To blend with the white sky / we speak admitting mortality." The verb "blend" matters here. It suggests the speakers are not frightened of fading but are choosing to dissolve gently into the evening, as the orange gives way to white. The sky also frames the poem, appearing as "clouded" at the start and "white" at the end. The clouds have cleared or thinned, and the sense of dimness has become plain light.
The poem is also notable for its tone. Death is spoken of between friends, in a "friendly" setting, with no drama and no grief on show. The word "challenge" is the only hint of difficulty, and even that is attached to the tall trees, which suggests that facing mortality is something to be looked up at rather than run from. The poem seems to say that honest talk can be as beautiful as a sunset, and that admitting we will end is part of what makes the colours vivid.
For a student reader, the poem is worth studying because it shows how much a poem can do without rhyme or fixed rhythm. Its energy comes from the sequence of its colours, the placement of its single words, and one carefully delayed idea. It rewards a second reading, because once you know where it ends, the early blue sea and the late white sky look like two ends of one long conversation.