Color Study While Withdrawing

The new couch is gray. Or it’s a color

called, in the inflated language of glossy ads,

puffed musk. Which, to be more precise, 

looking more closely now, is a shade of mushroom 

somewhere between morel and portobello. Why 

do I keep thinking it’s gray? 

are hazel, but tend, certain days, toward gray.

If you’ve ever seen a foal just birthed, that 

so-fast tremor of skin new to air, my daughter’s

eyes are like that—the sense of being wholly

alive. My daughter’s eyes are gray.

I feel the pull, magnetic, of the time I almost

managed to escape this life, and that, too, is gray,

like if you ever mixed papier-mâché. Which

is wet newspaper covered in a flour and glue

paste. That pull is like this, holding a cold glop

of that grayness, when your only real desire

is to have clean hands.

is to look at the couch. That gray, textured,

tactile, so here. To avoid the too-alive gray

of my daughter’s eyes. To ignore the sick-

wet pull of the in-between.

and stare at the couch’s back. My daughter

watches mine.