I

I set out to paint the light

by David Matthews


I set out to paint the light
when it grows soft at summer’s end,
but could not wrap my thoughts
around the immensity of neglect
and remorse grown with a wildness
of grass thigh high
and tick-infested weeds
devouring the grounds of a spirit
wreathed in disrepair…
Night fell on my heart,
and the colors came out wrong.
 

David Matthews

David Matthews is a native of the South Carolina Midlands, resident of Portland, Oregon, poet, runner, and unaffiliated intellectual. He draws on diverse traditions to fashion poems that at their best convey a sense of something akin to what the Romantics referred to as the sublime and the Surrealists termed the marvelous. Poems have appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Quill & Parchment, Fault Lines (anthology), and elsewhere.