Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Chroma

The day is order out of slightly.
Nothing note up much comes of.
Still like violet I should try
To do from my comfortable edge
What I softly hardly know how to.
Instead I think stark being with you
In the heaven process of the bed
Just after whatever time of day
Or driving like there isn’t death
Toward those same sunbacked hills
The bible camps in West Texas say
Are whence comes my help, now
Sitting patient as stopped derricks.
Even moving through this hostile
Compound of men, desert, and fuel,
It’s as though the unbearable is
Just a handwritten road sign at dusk
That hopes in three seconds to transmit
Its hate out into the total traffic
By adding a picture to the time
We endure by looking at its going
Retrospective, getting taken down,
Moved out and left behind
In the non-public room where it hangs.

Geoffrey G. O’Brien

Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s 5th book, Experience in Groups, will be out from Wave Books in April 2018. He is the author most recently of People on Sunday (Wave, 2013) and the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets (Minus A Press, 2012). O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison.