A room in Arles, walls painted yellow,<\/p>\n
yellow for faith and love,<\/p>\n
for a newly discovered self<\/p>\n
stripped to the waist<\/p>\n
in the torrid cicada heat,<\/p>\n
the chatter of wings rubbing together<\/p>\n
as Vincent with a brush dipped in mauve<\/p>\n
fading to grey,<\/p>\n
mauve for hope<\/p>\n
and grey for intelligence, considers painting<\/p>\n
a self-portrait, a grey undercoat for the way<\/p>\n
it largesses the mind with jars of glistening fruit<\/p>\n
and bridges x\u2019d with sacrifice,<\/p>\n
crossings he\u2019d made near Antibes<\/p>\n
where light slithers along brackish channels<\/p>\n
winding south across les Salins,<\/p>\n
the great salt plains where a man can disappear<\/p>\n
overnight, just evaporate<\/p>\n
like standing water. This story<\/p>\n
told about Poseidon, earth shaker<\/p>\n
and tamer of wild horses; how he rose<\/p>\n
storm-faced from the sea in a chariot<\/p>\n
pulled by brine-soaked steeds, grey and dappled<\/p>\n
like the horses of the Camargue, the mythical ones<\/p>\n
women ride in dreams. Perhaps<\/p>\n
he should paint a woman dying a red cloth<\/p>\n
dipped five times in madder root<\/p>\n
and meadowsweet mixed with oak galls and graith<\/p>\n
to set the color, the way red,<\/p>\n
red for passion, burns when mixed<\/p>\n
with chrome yellow<\/p>\n
and he remembers a miner in the Borinage<\/p>\n
caught in a fire that scarred his forehead<\/p>\n
with a crown of thorns, mouth<\/p>\n
fitted with a wooden tongue.<\/p>\n
He will paint how worn misshapen shoes today<\/p>\n
With a brush dipped in burnt umber,<\/p>\n
brown the color of service to others.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A room in Arles, walls painted yellow, yellow for faith and love, for a newly discovered self stripped to the waist in the torrid cicada heat, the chatter of wings rubbing together as Vincent with a brush dipped in mauve fading to grey, mauve for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":998,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/998"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38156,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38152\/revisions\/38156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}