I went to a poetry workshop today. Good stuff. Here's the first of three poems I wrote in class, and I'm sure more will come soon.
It was all green when we arrived,
a musty green transformed by dust
into the kind of green we
wanted to forget,
instead filling the house with a late eighties beige, and
hand-stained cherry wood,
and the Pfaltzgraff blue of the yellow kitchen
my mother always dreamed of.
We could never eradicate that green, it
hid in closets and dark corners of the creek-fed basement, and
escaped into the woods across the street,
or grew sometimes outside my window,
propping up sharp improbable Maryland grapes.
Still these many years later that green
appears unwelcomed in mental counterpoint to the
equally forgotten hues of brown or orange
on street corners or in junk shops,
never quite cool enough then
to be remembered fondly now.
Yet before we moved
there,
my favorite color was green.
