One day he had displayed gradations of such
mild sunlit colors as you would associate
with hay.
The next, he’s taking on innumerable shades
of blue.
He’d always wondered what the Color God
.
would choose to use for him as his
inimitable hue.
And so he’d signed a contract with that god
to be
a human canvas onto which this Maestro
of all Shades would then array the subtle timbres
.
he had contemplated might be worth it to
pursue.
An asterisk after “pursue” betook him to espy
right
at the bottom of the document that signing it
meant he’d receive a bonus of eternal life.
.
Out of any god’s gateau, that surely, for a
mortal,
had to have to be the nicest slice. What
could there be
now but eternal fascinations and delights? The
Color
God appeared already to have found him
inexhaustible.
.
Unless, as the unwelcome thought began to
press,
he was a reflex: an all-purpose surface to
imbue with
drippings from the chromosphere the Hue-god
had
a whim to view. He never knew, he’d had to
guess.
.
Would it matter? Surely no. Then, oh! – before
his
second century of servitude was done, when it
had
long been not remotely fun, he wished he could
emend
his answer to a please-have-mercy-on-me YES:
.
it matters. But the contract was unmerciful,
as odds say contracts are with gods. He was
its slave.
Its tenure was forever, an un-openable gate:
the lesson (keep your guard up with a god) too late.
.
He was bereft.
But then he thought,
what god?
And he got up and left.
.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment