Dear Vincent, a poem

When I hear your name,

I see yellow, blues but mostly

Yellow, not the artificial kind but

The one that charms,

That ladies wear, that dashes through the sky

When the crickets come out,

That splays across prickling cornfields

Like a carpet flush across the arid plain.

I close my eyes on tired days

And I see you,

Standing in front of a canvas like a

Jockey stands before an

Unbroken mare, you have your sleeves rolled up and

Straw hat pulled low, firmly gripping brush and

Slashing, twisting and pulling on the taut fabric                                                    

With your unharbored insanity, pellets of paint staining

Your freckled arms, your nose,

The air thick with the yellow fumes of your

Feverish lust.

What was inside of your

Soul, Vincent –

Was it fire or

Ice?

Both can burn, you know

Both can sear the flesh from bone and crumbling marrow –

Turn fractured glass into a mirage of the human heart.

What was it like, Vincent,

To not know the slopes, the crooked angles

Of your own body and soul,

To be attacked by a sharp-toothed monster nestled

Deep inside your heart –

Was it frightening, when

It ate you?

Did you feel its gnashing teeth, its caustic breath,

Tearing your limbs into some contorted dance

At the mercy of a satanic puppet-master

With all the leisure in the world?

What were you thinking, Vincent,

When you pressed the silver blade to your ear –

Were your hands shaking, were they sweating?

Did you scream, thrash about like a fish slick from

A crescent fall of crimson river-water,

Or did you stare, uninterested, as you worked your way

Around the pink, exposed flesh, the mutilated cartilage,

Hands steady, with all the precision in the world?

A human is not a canvas, Vincent.

He cannot be molded, altered, changed to fit a purpose.

You forgot – temporarily, dear – that your

Skill lies in brushes and pots,

Not sculpture.

You know, Vincent,

Someone once said to me that

Good artists are quite like teacups,

Fine-boned china men with the fragility of roses –

And God, dressed in his Sunday-morning kimono

Eating a piece of burnt buttered toast –

He is the tea-maker.

Now us, the normal, the average –

We get half a cup, rarely more –

A fine Grey Earl or strong Japanese herb, if you prefer,

We are born with the influx of hot liquid into our bowels,

The dunking of

Tea leaves on our rims,

Souls sloshing around in the

Confines of our porcelain rib-cages.

Our lives are measured in sips between bites of toast

And the Sunday paper –

Life rises in the form of white steam,

We disappear between God’s lips,

Drained and gone.

Now good artists, now they are of an

Entirely different kind –

God is thirsting for caffeine, for a buzz

He pours some tea, then more, then more

Tea and soul and blood mix and spill in a fiery carnage

A kaleidoscopic outrage

Liquid splashes down the sides of these fragile glasses

Overflowing onto saucers, and embroidered dollies.

Artists need room, I’m told, they need space –

They paint their spilled tea onto the whiteness of a canvas,

The blankness of a page,

The yellow gleam of a solitary spotlight

Spouting their troubles into monologues and dances –

A good artist does not do good work,

A good artist turns himself into the masterpiece.

He frets over his imperfections, the cracks in his demeanor,

Wrings the blood out of a washcloth

And cries himself to sleep at night.

Did your teacup spill, Vincent?

Did your oolong flow down the sides of your thin china walls–

Until you forgot the color of dry?

That harsh, blinking simplicity,

Walls too fragile and too glass-like to withstand the

Imbalance within?

How does fire taste, Vincent,

When you forced the toxic paint down your throat.

Were you trying to fill yourself with

Color? Lavish blues and

Bloody reds,

Creamy yellows perfect enough to simply

Melt the soul?

Were you trying to turn

Yourself into the art?

To use the canvas of your

Intestines, the wraparound pearl

Of your stomach – to mix the base pinks of flesh

With the variegated shades of liquid poison?

Did it hurt, Vincent?

When you stepped into the yellow fields, when you

Pressed the gun to your chest –

Did it hurt?

No, I don’t mean the bullet,

The shattering of the ribcage into fine dust –

What I mean is,

What did you think, Vincent?

Did you see Theo’s face, in the sky?

Did your heart contort and twist itself into

An indistinguishable blackness,

A scorching ash, a human vessel with the weight of

Rusting iron?

When I hear your name, Vincent, I see

Yellow, blues but mostly

Yellow, I see the sun dripping through oak trees

In the summer, and honey glistening in a jar

I see yellow, the kind that charms,

That full-moon yellow that orbits the land,

The kind that resides in the bottoms of cornfields –

Rises like smoke through the petals of dying suns,

And that creases the sky when the crickets come out.

I see the yellow that lights a fire and then burns to a

Crisp –

Nighttime coming,

Drained and gone.

The yellow that leaves shadows,

And monsters, when it’s done.

Love,

(And yes, Vincent, there is such a thing

As love in the world) –

Your native beast