Yellow

by Judy Kaber

after Lois Dodd’s painting “Johnson, VT Porch”

Light in this place is a gesture, a bloom

of yellow like dandelions, like the breast

of a canary where the chattering begins,

the feeling I got leaning my head

against his back when we rode

the BMW bike up the Gaspé with little

more than love to carry us along.

Light scarves the porch, embraces

its loneliness, set as it is against the black

side of the house, the unseen ground.

I’ve rarely seen anything so warm,

as inviting as the desire for that first kiss

from someone you admire. That yellow.

I imagine the people inside, sitting

at a table or pulling the sheet back

from a bed, hands bathed in strong,

tender light. Do you hear the sound

of crickets, notice the vestiges of moon-

light in strokes of sky? This porch is

like no place I’ve ever been, and yet

I fumble along the timeline of my life

searching as if I’ve lost it somehow,

left it behind as I rushed along to the next

lover, job, town. This yellow light smears

goodness. Welcomes  possibility

after possibility into the frame. I want to

bundle a few belongings, get in the car,

ride Vermont roads until I find it.

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Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks. Besides having been published previously in The Fourth River, her poems have appeared in joutnals such as Pleiades, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, “Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. A Maine Literary Award winner, her book, Landscape With Rocks, Sky, Nails, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).