The Yellow House

Arles, France

In one breath, a block of stone
hollowed, windowed, and painted
yellow. Summer, watercolored,
soaked through panes
of the sunny house.

The sky was usually turquoise,
painted in patchwork and seeping
through an archway shaped like a keyhole.
Above the rail station, though,
it was sometimes indigo tinged
with warm gray.

Your rooms were shaded,
suffocated in green shutters,
drawn glowing deep cobalt
from the insides. Your brush
could breathe only in gasps
of fleeting curtain flutter.

Oilcloth bed sheets lie stained
in struggling slats of light.
Diagonally across the road, a garden;
beyond it, gleam of moving water.
From that open mouth
of the Rhone, you hear
only half of what always-flowing
summer water spoke.

In a mirror above the wash basin,
chin bristled by drying sunflower petals,
you watch you, formulating
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear.
A background of tangerine and blood orange
tells us it will not be there forever.
You sketch.

Colorado

Listen, you said,
rolling the window down
in still morning, winding
the crank of the gramophone
of this cold new day.

First, just the hush
of evaporating sand,
crumbling adobe—
we’d been watching the pueblos
thin around us all week.
Orange wisps swirling
upward into quartz sky.

We waited in near-light
until, from the depths
of some unseen celestial cave,
it came shivering up the backs
of the snow-dusted canyons,

a careful copper light
inching over the vertebrae
of obsidian mountains
etched into the horizon,
sun finally flowing
over the bone-dry mesa
in one trembling yawn:

some god’s whispering
life into day.