I have heard it said that
You would’ve been great, regardless of where the trains took you.
Regardless of if they took you.
That even stirring the paint in the factory, even
Inhaling the cool, acrylic simplicity of
Pale buttercup-cream yellow,
Mother-ocean cobalt blue, or just clean, precise white. Even if dipping one
wrinkled, aging finger into iron black #43,
You would have been great.

But I’m unsure. Maybe some people can achieve only
when there is nothing but unbalanced equations. Nothing but
Ugly, florescent beige. Nothing but sinking, unknowable grey.

Like Van Gogh, tearing off his own ear and observing with the eye of
A technician or a painter (intertwined like helix strands) the whirling spectacle
Of the canal, poised as entry to the brain, as entry to that strange,
Whirring vessel that contains the secrets to
Man’s ferocious hunting of other men - but
Also to starry Night and Chagall making the mating of Adam and Eve.

It was chemistry, godful mother of invention,
wrangled into the shapes of beasts, a great white-coater warped and bruised
By false Teutonic technicians that gave them the reactants for
Auschwitz and crematoriums. It was chemistry who nursed you, bore you stoically into
A blinking, gasping daylight. And I think about the strangeness of science,
And where you would be if I had saved you, an old man of the expected world
Telling me over espresso of the smooth, quiet knowing:
The understanding of the paint factory.