Wheat Field With Crows (Van Gogh)

#49

Have you studied the flight of crows?
They are always agitated, urgent.
Vultures teeter like drunken sots,
Cranes' wings beat insistent blows,
And hawks float lazily fluent --
Crows flap like worried thoughts.
Last week, I saw a hundred rise
From a wheat field recently mown.
They wheeled and as one dropped down,
As though they no longer feared my eyes.
The painter saw them rise and flee
Beyond a path through the wheat,
Into darkening skies, where he couldn't see.
He painted going forward and retreat.

The Last Painting

The brushes kept slipping from his fingers.
Wind-tortured fields of wheat under darkened skies-
every brushstroke a nail.
The season's rustling hurry and the dusk
emotionless crows flap up to multiply
dun the wheat's gold and usurp the storm.
The blackened, infinite blue,
his palette's only suggestion of the primary;
red and yellow are plant and soil,
each decaying at the other's root.
And why the two moons? A starless night will come?
Is one a waning sun? When all else is clear:
grasses sprout darkly along the muddy path
that goes into the field to stop.
Or turns to go where the eye can't see.