Evening Landscape With Rising Moon (Van Gogh)

#53

Some painters depict. Some painters see.
It is unclear if Van Gogh even wanted us
To view his world of vibrating color
Moving faster than light, his string theory.
Each brushstroke is abstract, fibrous,
A strict, short thread, a measure
As fixed as E in a cosmic equation.
Unclear, because we sense a desperation,
A mania to eject onto space within a frame
A vision too intense for his soul to contain
(Not the insular effusion of the insane).
The painting contains things we can name:
Moon, hills, clouds, sky, hay,
But nothing we can see any other way.

Starry Night (Van Gogh)

#36

The Milky Way is a maelstrom of light
Where silence is the only stillness.
The cypress tree can only reach
At what cannot be bound by flight,
Distance being a kind of illness
Of idea, each too far from each.
Daily, I hurl at them a thought,
Even at those so great they would
Encompass Mars from our sun's core.
Wonder cannot be overwrought.
Van Gogh sees them as a flood
Oblivious of us on our lonely shore.
Mountains, trees, and houses are all
We may have, until the stars fall.

The Night Cafe

What's lost? A game of billiards: a ball
struck a ball, two rails, and another ball kissed,
then money changed hands. The loser stares
at the chalk-smeared bed where his future sleeps.

Two men rub their ears, hunched beneath vague hats;
elbows banging the table, they wait for booze.
A man with a glass weeps, seated near lovers;
when his rum is served the murdering will begin.

Green, red, and yellow-odor, texture, light
we encounter every day; but what are these
walls painted blood, floor and ceiling tinctured bile?
Let's all go mad sniffing the glow of gas lamps.