Impossible
B. a. Van Sise
I would paint you
in all the colors you
deserve: hyperbolic
orange, self-luminous
red, olo (of course)
and reddish green, all
I’ve seen from
meander to meander:
the oh- so- many beautiful hues
on view on the endless
roads, torn apart by time
and tremble, their stones
rocked into loose
affiliation: the tint
of ringing bells in
an empty town,
the shades of young lovers
bathing in rivers wearing
summer on their skin: every
dye that rides along with me
far beyond the time I saw them
without you. And so I’d
make your portrait using only
colors so far behind
the pale that you
yourself might not even be
seen: octarine and irrigo,
tones that scientists know
to be, like us, impossible.
I’d cap it all in Stygian
Blue, and hang you
up in a museum—- in the room,
ladies would come and
go, talking of Michelangelo,
but stop to look at the canvas
as solemn as if it were a saint:
but no, just swirls of unfeasible
paint to say in technicolorless voice:
be fearful, yes—- but first, rejoice.
​
B. A. Van Sise
B. A. Van Sise FRGS is an author, museum curator, and photographic artist with three monographs: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker, Invited to Life: After the Holocaust with Neil Gaiman, Mayim Bialik, and Sabrina Orah Mark, and On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues with DeLanna Studi, Philip Metres, Crisosto Apache, James Aronhióta's Stevens, Lehua Taitano, and dg opkik. His literary work has been featured in Poets & Writers, The North American Review, Nowhere, the Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Southampton Review, Eclectica, The Night Heron Barks, Cutleaf, Hayden’s Ferry Review, thimble, the Santa Clara Review and The Intrepid Times, among many others. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and he is a frequent reviewer of poetry and photography titles for the New York Journal of Books. For nonfiction he has been a finalist for the Travel Media Awards for feature writing and is a winner of both the Lascaux Prize for Nonfiction and the INDIES Book of the Year, and for poetry he has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and a winner of the Colonel Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards. He is a two-time winner of the Independent Book Publishers Awards gold medal: once for History and once for Poetry.