On the one hand, there’s what he painted first, the sound of (yellow leaving
the season, the surface in the water pitcher rising, green glass shutters,
a series of open-ended) questions. His bedroom in Arles (was all imagination
and fir) teemed with angular intrigue: two doors, two windows, cooler kinds
(of air than he was used to.) He included the miniatures on the wall as favors
to his friends, The Poet and The Lover (one painter short of a trinity) and prayed
(with scarlet red and let the bedspread do the cross-signing.) On the other hand,
there is the reality (that alligator green, as scaly and untouchable as) the flood
took the first draft a week later and its repetition was more turquoise (the lavish,
unswerving rest was executed in blue) this time (he had the canvas relined).
I put myself inside his (diorama, his locked drawer, the key to his locked) drawer.
On one hand there’s what I hear when I press my ear against (one of his two
blue doors) the end of September when he was beginning his réductions
(I can hear them simmering down to their jams) when yellow followed him
like an old dog (and died). And on the other hand, he inserted his self-portrait
into this third draft (straw beard, red hat, cheek as green as a splay of gold (cone
juniper)) and only in miniature. This display of affection, I call it (what it is:
his desire to live in a world alongside the things he couldn’t own). You can see
the blue in the blue milk jar getting bluer. You can watch the tail of the Old
Yellow Dog wagging dead and the ghost in the feather red (duvet) getting dustier.
Trapezoids of butter, triplets (stench of citrus festering). I call all three rooms home.