This time of year, the hot sun spiralling down on the farmlands,
makes me think about Van Gogh's wheat fields, the unrelenting
light, sky scratched with crows, their dark raucous chatter--
and I think about our short lives, chaff in the wind,
momentary in the darkening sky.  I think about
his cypresses, their black flames, his bruise-blue
irises that wince against the yellow wall, the vase
of sunflowers, those molten golds, the fierceness
of their burning.  Even the blues, Vincent's blues,
the cobalt intensity behind the yellow house,
the thunderclouded sky, should cool us down, but don't.
Instead, they boil at low flame.
He said in a letter to his brother, "I am in it with all
of my heart," and I am in it, too, this life, with its longing
and sorrows.  When we're gone, what will be left of our small
songs and minor joys?   Still, when I drive by a wheat field
turning ochre and amber, every awn and arista shouting sun!
sun!  sun!  something in me rises, makes me look
for a scrap of paper, a pencil nub,
even as the hot wind lifts,
blows the dust we are, carries it away--

                  -first published in Two Rivers Review

Out of the stony ground of his tortured life, these iris
rise, writhe, charmed like snakes by the song of the sun.
The wild blue heart of longing moves up, up,
from papery rhizomes, common dirt.  Out of nothing,
armfuls of sky.  They burn, flames in a hearth, as they dance
above the pale green swords of their leaves.  It’s all
or nothing, this loud shout, this wild abundance, a few short
weeks in May.  On the canvas, they sing forever.  The suffering
world recedes in the background.  They lean to the left, pushed
by the wind, but not one stalk is bent or broken.  Oh, the fierce
burning joys of this life; all the things of the world, about to vanish.

first published in Abalone Moon

Light of freshly pressed olive oil
spills through the plane trees
under whose deep shade-stippled branches
we sit, in a small café, glass of vin rouge,
clay bowl of olives.  Van Gogh
might have painted this, light that could be
bottled, corked, so you could dip in a crust of bread
on a winter night when the mistral roars 
down the vallée du Rhône like a deranged freight
train.  Vincent wrote, “There is no blue without yellow,” 
and you think of his house in Arles and the boiling sky;
the reapers sleeping in the wheat stacks, the azure field 
of noon rising behind them; “La Nuit Étoilée,” fiery 
pinwheels floating in slashes of cobalt and cerulean, 
the reflected lights casting their nets of gold 
on the blueblack Rhône. . . .

Just as you and I walk along its banks tonight, 
man and woman, light and reflection, point and counterpoint.
And if one of us goes on the last journey
into the long dark?  There is no gold without blue, no yin
without yang, no me without you.
                       
   -first published in Buckle &

My son has been pacing, wringing his fingers,
flicking from news to weather channels,
as a hurricane moves up the coast.
His panic is palpable, lurks in the murky air
pushed up from the tropics ahead of the storm.
Nothing we say can calm him, as he wears a groove in the rug.
I think of Van Gogh, those wheat fields under the pulsing
sun, the scornful voices of the crows, the writhing blue sky.
Think how hard the simplest action must be
when those voices won't leave you alone,
when even the stars at night throb and gyrate.
My son says his skin crawls, his back is always itchy.
What would it be like to lift from this earth,
rise above a sea of molten gold, scratch 
your name on the blue air, "caw caw caw,"
be nothing more than a black pulse beating,
rowing, your way back to God?

 -first published in Drunken Boat

                                                                                                              La Nuit Étoilée

THE UNFINISHED WORK IN BLUE AND GOLD
will never be completed; no matter how hard I try
to dress it up, shine its shoes, it can only
approximate, never measure up
to what's outside the window calling
"over here   over here"
 
The sky, blue as the robes of Titian's Madonna,
this gold, the leaves of the Osage Orange,
it could come from Monet's haystacks,
but that's not quite right either--
 
Maybe the gold is a solo by Charlie Parker,
notes turned liquid in the autumn sun,
maybe the blue is the implacable sky
where Van Gogh's church at Auvers
floats off the earth.
On the tape at the Musée d'Orsay,
he said, "I look for the blue."
But you don't have to look hard,
Vincent, my man, the blues
will find you anyway,
even on a starry night.
 
I sail off in the blue canoe of the sky,
let the sun turn every little hair on my arms gold,
dip my paddle in the water, try again.

-first published in Poet Lore