Some years brown stands up, elbowing aside
the other colors, those
splashy failures of the papers still falling,
even here, even in this den of words.
Brown. Not yellow, not red, not gold. No,
don’t tell me you see them in me.
This time it’s brown:
Humble suitable reasonable plain old dependable
brown.
Not chestnut, not rust, not burnt sienna.
Brown.
Painting by Bob van Buuren. Photograph of Van Buuren by Sander Troelstra. Hermitage Amsterdam.
While I was out looking
all these other
people came along
whose names I
never heard, their sound
being buried in my
own next word –
oh we’ll be galloping, galloping
high on our horse and absurd!
On your white porch fronting your dense
Catskill wood you’ll wander the mind backward
through the midnight ocean, the black
forest, golgotha, to, at last, our primieval
garden. You’ll wonder what went wrong.
Who’d mean to keep old God away? Not you,
though you did, as now, his cross but a
seesaw – up and down and nothing changed.
Utrecht Journal 