He saw the gray on black, and that
was that. Two shapes of dark
came at him, parted, waited.
Shapes had been like chairs before.
He could always rest in a shape.
Before the gray came,
every oblong was a way to say the world,
a pitched tent of color in the wild
and arbitrary forest of all our longings.
He even found his own Matisse,
his homage, in oblongs, like a window
thrown open on yellow and orange, on patterns
that only the casual eye, lazy with joy, can find.
Sometimes he dreamt the world pastel,
dreamy curtains of color he hung
over bars of light, and left to be opened.
But he couldn’t drench the black.