primary colors

Primary Colors
Not long after we’d broken them in,
And before we’d
Drawn on
the quarters
My brother, sister and I
Were given a choice:
What color to paint the walls
of our bedrooms.

Dean, eldest, chose blue
Blue like 8 feet
At Rec. Center One
treading like mad
while the swim coach
paced impatient for a target
for his left slipper:
the first to drop hands
or chin in water.

Kristine, youngest,
chose pink
pink like a volcano in reverse
sunset over clouded Waianae range
when earth tried
to swallow fire.

I chose yellow.
I imagined it happy,
And the color of beginnings.
Breakfasts (besides the multicolored
cereals) always glowed yellow:
Grapefruit, buttered toast, waffle.
And eastern sunlight shafting in
Between glass louvers
And my sandy canthuses
Always stained the world gold.

My parents painted the walls in a couple of days.
But the colors never quite dried
and as we played,
studied,
slept,
and dreamt
bouncing off the walls
their wet insistence stained us again and again.

Now I am older,
with a bit of jaundice in the eye.
We are all older,
my brother, my sister and I.

But no matter where we have gone
or what we have done
in years between
we could neither deepen nor wash out
the stains of who we are,
or who we have been.

A three-colored rainbow
has little choice but to span a gap.

Which makes me wonder:
when our parents asked us, so long ago,
did we really choose our colors,
or did the colors choose us?