Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

WITHOUT THE TUSCAN RED

It burnt my umber and how how that village,
quaint as a Copenhagen chocolate box
stuffed with keepsakes and fading billets-doux,
was past preening itself, even past purring,

and just snoozed on in the crook of the mountains
knocking tourists’ socks off
with its patina they took for its soul—
the crooked gables, the crooked shutters,

the crooked little streets—and happily snapped
scads of iPhone shots and then moved on.
Not me. I’d set myself a harder task.
I wanted to capture the village in all its moods,

its common joys and isolated sorrows,
its life in time’s alembic abstracted
on one transcendent canvas, period.
It was a near thing. My sanity itself

came under siege: angle after angle,
ochre after ochre—botch after botch.
Took luck, yes, and skills I scarcely possessed;
but I couldn’t have done it without the Tuscan red.

Jeffrey Gustavson is the author of Nervous Forces (Alef Books) and of Turpentine Headache, published earlier this year by Ristretto Books. His work has appeared in Agni, Arrowsmith Journal, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Canto, Epiphany, Fence, The Fiddlehead, Grand Street, The New Yorker, Nine Mile, The Paris Review, The Plum Review, Plume, Poetry, and other journals. In 1997, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, which he used for a residency at the Montana Artists Refuge. He lives in New York City.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx