Matthew Gellman

COLOR THEORY

If, as Goethe said, darkness
is a twin to light and not its opposite,
I could think of your cruelty

with gentleness: Your closed fist
on the balcony—light.
Your routine neglect—light.

That way, I can more kindly
reframe my refusal to quit
your mouth, a sign of my optimism

that I came back
to your crushed beer cans
on the floor. Hiroshige

painted Edo a hundred times
in search of its truest light,
casting the city in a blizzard at night

to then insist on color. Little,
I painted a chaos of meadow
while my mother stood above me,

guiding my fingers,
spelling the names
of each color I misused.

Wittgenstein says that some colors
are fixed, rooted in place,
like alders, while others

are on a continuum,
a fragment of that
slow-moving dance

between darkness and light,
which according to Goethe
generates all color,

the burning that passes
between our eyes
two halves of the same song.

Little, I learned primary colors
from the mess I made with them,
but I’ve never since pinned down

the murky, in-between shade
of belonging. Your sadness was white—
no, it’s gray. Your anger

was purple. Or is it green?
The chaos we made—
my fingers are streaked with it. See?

MATTHEW GELLMAN is the author of Beforelight, selected by Tina Chang as the winner of BOA Editions, Ltd. 's A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His second book, The Understudy, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2027. Gellman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brooklyn Poets, Adroit's Djanikian Scholars Program, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference.