Yellow Door
A Poem by Nicholas Trandahl
My wife paints the door yellow, knowing it’s my favorite color, knowing it makes me happy, calm, and positive about things, even if our house is grey, even if the sky is dense with rain or snow, or night has fallen heavy as a funeral shroud and myths have pulled themselves out of the darkness, Jupiter injured hunting a bighorn sheep, carried skyward in the blood-soaked arms of Ares, Andromeda chained helpless to a brine-soaked rock somewhere in the Aegean, Perseus screaming in from the north on the back of Pegasus, blade brandished with righteous violence like my own those many foggy years ago in Qatar, righteous violence like American missiles in Ukrainian hands, skyward sparrows of Saint Olga all aflame, holding back a whole cloak of darkness or perhaps snows, sharp cold of death, what came for the ragged remnants of Napoleon’s men when they fled back toward Paris like a star collapsing into something so unbelievably dense, smoldering with such pressure that time no longer means anything, that light means nothing, not even that sunrise the other day which painted the clouds in pink nuclear neon and caught fire to the southeast, over the snow and the pines, with all the oranges and yellows God could gather from His palette and heap generously on His brush because even though that morning wasn’t special in any civilized way, it still deserved to begin so beautifully, like the second movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol” or anything composed by Saint Hildegard, how it all flows like wind into vacant spaces of particles, seas of photons and ethereal matter waiting for delicious things to fill them up until every cup runneth over, but they don’t runneth over, instead just growing and growing, swelling and swelling, brighter and brighter, more and more yellow bleeding through the boundaries of a life which should’ve stopped breathless and empty on a floor in some desert somewhere, through doom which rose a range of dark jagged crags without snowfields, without grass for grazing herds of elk, without creeks full of trout for moose to wander along, bleeding through all of this, and it keeps going and going because there’s nothing to stop it as long as I keep my eyes open, let all that yellow in like a happy scripture of a wise smiling saint or bodhisattva, eyes kind and warm as amber, incense in his beard, honesty open in his words, and I want to listen, let it all in, all of it, until every cell of me is vibrating with mirth and serenity, with all the things I thought I left behind in the desert, with all the things I thought were broken in the depths of a merciless winter which told me I knew nothing and all the things around me seemed as intangible as campfire smoke, even as I tried to grab them, to hold them in my hands before I lost them entirely, and then I felt something, then something else, a firm edge there, some soft and giving flesh here, and I held onto it like a timber floating in a stormy sea with waves and wind as violent as something Homer put Odysseus through, and Odysseus weathered every morsel of Poseidon’s wrath, didn’t he, and so shall I, so shall I, and I watch the way the light touches the fresh yellow paint of the door, how it glows, how I know now things are starting to get better, and maybe I can even see the shore, and maybe I can reach it if I just kick my legs a little bit harder and keep swimming.
Nicholas Trandahl is an award-winning poet, journalist, outdoorsman, and veteran residing in northern Wyoming, where he currently also serves as mayor of his community. He has had five poetry collections published and has also been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Trandahl has been awarded the Wyoming Writers Milestone Award and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, he works as poetry editor for The Dewdrop literary journal and as a contributor for The Way Back to Ourselves literary journal, while also serving as chairman of the annual Eugene V. Shea National Poetry Contest.
