Uprooted

     I believe that no matter how academically correct a figure may be, it is superfluous... once
         it lacks that essential modern aspect, the intimate character, the real action.
                                                                                   – Vincent van Gogh, in a letter

He picked flies from the canvas.
Low-hanging branches
scratched the painted surface
as he made his way back
from the fields. 
These were not irritations,
but bits of the reality he wanted to paint,
the life outside of studios and posed models,
where peasants dug and scythed
and he contrived against the wind
a system of anchors for his easel and tools,
and a stormy intensity to chase
the tones of light in an autumn day,
touch the exposed nerve at the moment
of its rapidly changing effects
like the woman bending over
to uproot a carrot and brush off the clumped earth,
that instant brought so close
and so deeply loved and dashed
with such thick strokes against the canvas
it broke like the waves
that eventually conquer rock.





Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits


He’s always looking out from
a distant place, gnarled stone alcove,
the deepest room in some dusty library.

Its arches, muscled over by moss,
vines knuckling into their seams,
lie outside the frame, unseen.

But so is nearly everything,
even his robed figure,
crowded around by dark curtains, 

shadows, not of mere gloom,
but the chasms that must be bridged
to meet even our nearest neighbor:

who sits in his insulated interior,
guarded from the slightest draft,
trapping sound, smothering light

to a single drop of dusk
beading in the eyes, just enough for us
to recognize each other.