Jared Campbell
Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that Jared Campbell has won our poetry contest on the theme Color Our World with his piece "Favorite Painting."
Jared M. Campbell is a lawyer living in Overland Park. His writing has appeared in Rattle, The Lyric, The Oxford Magazine, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, LandLocked, and other publications.
Favorite Painting
My wife’s favorite painting in the Met
is Henri Rousseau’s The Repast of the Lion.
Every time we went she’d stand looking
at it for a few minutes while I’d
study Van Gogh’s tree or flower paintings.
I never understood what she saw
in Rousseau, in his awkward flat spaces,
his cartoonish figures, his far-fetched
subjects. Then we moved away from New York,
and I bought a copy for her birthday.
After it had hung in our living room
for a year, I started to appreciate
the coolness and diversity of its greens,
the rhythm of the trunks and blades of grass,
the childlike way Rousseau treats every leaf
as equally deserving of attention,
the way clusters of color rhyme across
the canvas, yellow flowers with yellow flowers,
blue with mysterious blue, white with white,
creating balance and a kind of order.
Lately, this has become my favorite painting.
I don’t know what my wife sees when she sees it.
I see how love changes you, how over the years
two people can grow into alignment, how
their tastes, desires and needs can come to rhyme
and balance, even in the absence of
a perfect understanding. Not everything
can be communicated to each other.
I asked her what she loves about this painting.
“It’s so simple.” In a way, it is.