No Painting Worth Its Paint
If we could dream him back / we would.
– Josh Kalscheur
But there is no going back, no way
to remove the memories of having lived
in that time, no way to undress the wound
and watch the blood run back
into the body, the jagged star closing
in on itself. Every sweetness must
eventually take its turn in the compost,
giving back the essence of its light. No
freeze-frame in the live world. No painting
worth its paint that does not somehow
move in the mind or reveal traces of the hand
that made it. All the second chances,
what did they teach me, if not to dream
more wildly toward a kingdom in which the king
was not so cruel? If I could be anyone
in the whole world, I would still be me.
It has taken me half a life to learn what love is
and is not. It has taken all the loss I could earn.
In All the Wrong Places
Some days, it seemed happiness came before
the bottle, arriving at dawn or noon,
some bland scene I’d be walking through
suddenly smiling at the light hitting the leaves
of one tree across the way & effortlessly
I would be, for a moment, the tree
burning in the lumens of our star—
but of course, I had to work & being my own boss
meant that time was like math in 11th grade—
I didn’t get it & stared dumbly at the teacher
who repeated the word arbitrary so often
I almost grasped what it meant, though
I’ll admit there was a part of me that thought
of tributaries when he spoke & I’d be gone
again, wading upstream, usually between
steep banks with the sound washing over me
like a thousand distant conversations, & I
preferred it this way, being outside
of earshot, thirsty for wonder, unable
to quench or quell the ache of it always ending
just as it was getting good.
Ode to ADD
Under the pile of coats
left at the base of the stairs
is a book I will never read.
I stare at it and dream
and never look beyond
the cover. I don’t know why
I care so much about the costs
of distraction. Beauty
is a dream that ends well.
I am not my doings. Not
even my stillness. There is
a little glow that makes a sound
only children and the very old
can hear. It belongs to no one
and is in every animation.
Not animal. That is the body.
This is the token that makes it run.
That thing we call joy
that rises from the running.
Ghazal of Lost Years
Out of the dream, we made two sons and learned that love was letting go,
a life made up of days, of longer hours, somehow letting minutes go
to ache for sleep or the chance to read a book or meet a friend to talk
about what was most alive in the middle years, letting go
of our dreams, somehow looking back upon a sheaf of pages scattering in the wind,
hurts often brighter than the joys, especially for us who numbed the years, letting go
of first steps and picture books, who cooed lullabies to our young, thick-tongued,
slurring love in a musk of booze, for us who seemed to think that letting go
meant being stoned, meant not remembering in the dawn, and so, somehow, years
just disappeared, and that was a part of how we learned what love was not. Let go,
I sing each night before the mirror. Mateo, love is showing up so fully it hurts.
You couldn’t have known this from the start. The past cannot be owned.
Dusk Loop
Some things, then, cannot be repaired and must go on, into a kind of dusk
that seems somehow endless, somehow stuck on a short loop, the way
high-minded thieves trick security guards before breaking into the vault,
switching over the live feed of a camera to a pre-recorded scene in which
nothing happens. And because we have seen this done so many times now
in that same repeated movie, we can believe it really happens, and because
we can believe it, it must be so. A master hand hits a switch at a well-timed
blink and, voila, a dusk that is always that same dusk, rolls on, the backdrop
to all the memories I can still access in which I was terrible to you, my
dear boy, all the times I raged at your sweet, how it was me that eventually
broke it free from your small hands and did not stop it from drifting away.
Because the dusk keeps being that same dusk, I don’t have to change. I am
always performing some act of cruelty, always hearing your confused, sad cry
when I said your mother and I were splitting up. I held you too close then.
What could you need from me now? No apology will ever be enough.
Matthew Nienow is the author of two collections published by Alice James Books: House of Water (2016) and If Nothing (2025), where you can find these poems once published. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his wife and two sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.
Read four more poems by Matthew Nienow originally published in Terrain.org.
