“Eigengrau” 

First published (in print): The Tule Review, 2020; Sacramento Poetry Center Press

[poem_start]

Though I held God’s many hands, I lost him still

Amongst the ageless monochrome,

That landscape of woes,

The impressionist’s true nightmare.

Like the hills I once traipsed in my life’s dawn,

Bearing a canvas of pearl and a peacock’s palette.

From out the shadowed folds, a familiar hand filled

My ears with a posy of irises.

“Each loss, a gain.”

Atop the storied hill,

I watched emerald blades wave,

Beaches ebb and flow from white to blue,

And soaring birds whose backdrop a sky of many different hues.

Amongst the opulence, I still wished for a palette as wide as the horizon.

I rather should have asked for a mirror or an umbrella.

I saw the clouds surge overhead, and they lamented

Their ashen woes. Within the wasted land,

My eyes tried every mode to morph, meld, and fold.

To make something out of nothing.

Endless permutations painted that familiar hand once again.

In this oblivion, benevolence held a laurel a few decades wide

And crowned it around my tired eyes.

Eternities birthed eternities,

And I but slogged in their afterbirths.

It was then I came upon

The fragrance of some sweet soul

From the cold, a chickweed:

“Behold, a diminutive herald,

But let us not be forgotten.”

[poem_end]