As I came down the ridge, I found myself in a yellow maple grove turning to autumn and all the leaves were Turner yellow, and the goldenrods were Turner yellow, and it was like I was in a Turner painting except I wasn’t on the sea in a ship. I was 300 miles inland. Also, this wasn’t England. It was Appalachia, but those were just details, trying to distract me from the fact of yellow, which was around me and becoming me.

That was this afternoon, and now it’s dark, and I’m in my house, and the rain falling on the metal roof sounds yellow. Acorns are dropping off oak trees all over Appalachia and all over England and all over the northern hemisphere, and tomorrow my wife and I will gather them so we can grind them into a golden paste that we’ll turn into biscuits and cookies, and they’ll be filled with the yellow of autumn. When we eat them, we’ll be autumn too.

I think Turner was autumn, and I know that he was that shade of yellow. It’s the one that, when you stand in his section of the Tate, works its way inside of you, and you know he’s teaching you something real and fundamental, but you can’t speak it because there are no words for it.

If there were words for it, we wouldn’t need his paintings, and we need them so badly. His is the yellow that explodes the dawn joyful.

And I told him so just this afternoon as I drove back home from that yellow grove. He was silent about the matter. What does he need to say after all that isn’t captured in the yellow of his painting bursting like sunrise, drumming on my roof like rain, filling me like acorns in autumn.

Publisher’s Note:

“Your business, Winsor, is to make colours. Mine is to use them,” said Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), quoted in an article at Winsor & Newton (manufacturers of artists’ materials, established in 1832 in London): “Palettes of the masters: JMW Turner (Discover how JMW Turner revelled in experimenting with pigments, from gamboge to ultramarine. Explore how Turner’s daring experiments with pigments shaped his iconic landscapes and seascapes...)”

Link retrieved on 21 December 2025:
https://www.winsornewton.com/blogs/articles/jmw-turner-colour-palette?_pos=1&_sid=1c7e989d6&_ss=r

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. The founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, he is also the author of 23 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction, including his latest, Days of Recent Divorce (Arroyo Seco Press, 2023); Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020); and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration featuring artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham. John is also co-author with Kendall Johnson and Kate Flannery of Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets (MacQ, 25 December 2024), a collection of prose poems by the three authors, plus artworks by Kendall Johnson.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in the Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in Issue 16 (January 2023) of MacQueen’s Quinterly (aka MacQ)

⚡ Little Dancer, Aged 75, Paris 1940, ekphrastic microfiction by John Brantingham in MacQ (Issue 13, May 2022)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQ (Issue 9, August 2021), subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of Brantingham’s ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted