“Color Merchants” by W.S. Merwin

They had no color themselves nothing about them
        suggested the spectrum from which they were making
a living the one who had arrived with experience
        from the city to open a shop in the old square
wearing his glasses on his forehead vowing allegiance
        to rusticity understanding what anyone
wanted to the exact tone a head waiter of hues
        or the one who had gone away to be a painter
in Paris and had come back in the war no longer
        young wearing his beret with a difference
a hushed man translucent as paper who displayed
        artists’ supplies in a town without artists and could
recall the day when he and a few old men
        and farm boys ambushed the column of Germans heading
north to the channel after the invasion
        and held them up for most of an hour and afterward
how he had sat with his easel day after day at one end
        of the low bridge where the guns had blackened that
summer afternoon and had listened to the rustle
        of the leaves of limes and plane trees and to the shallow
river whispering one syllable on the way
        to the island and he had tried to find the right shades
for the empty street and the glare on the running water