Ding an Sich: For Aldous Huxley

By: Andrew Boden

 

            Word and pigment

            render page and painting

            but not the chair in which Van Gogh

            sat nights, trying to comprehend

            the canvas called reality

            by consensus of ear and eye,

            skin touching the pointillist

            illusion that is a chair,

            or the young man’s hand

            clutching the paint brush

            against his heart,

            because just for a second

            he saw the chair as it was before his birth

            into this world of conned senses

            and tried, in vain, to paint it.

          - From Uncollected Poems Lying Around the House