Today's poem is by Carmen Germain

The Fixed Stars
        Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining
        dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots
        on the map of France? Just as we take the train
        to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.

                Letter from Vincent to Theo
                July 1889

Van Gogh worked with nothing in his belly but milk
and dry bread so he could buy paint, and it's true—
he squeezed tubes on canvas and flowed through his fingers
olive groves, cypress, and wheat fields. The starry night.

When his warder went with him as far as the ravine
of Les Peyroulets, van Gogh saw deep red
and burnt sienna, rosemary and black pine,
strands of fire in the narrow valley down slope,
mid-day sun in the V, and a stream of cerulean
falling, rock face, and every living thing:
two women on the trail, each in crimson.

When he left the asylum, some paintings
were abandoned or forgotten in a case in his cell,

maybe a companion piece to the ravine
but painted in morning light, which changes
everything. Sun in the valley citron,
and in shadow, rock face purple and rich blue,
rosemary emerald and russet gold. Path empty,
and the music of yellow warblers, his favorite
color, that kind of hope.

How the boy who found the pictures
showed them to his friend—

"What shall we do with them?"

          "We could use them as targets,"

and they propped Les Peyroulets in Morning Sun
and shot it full of holes.

Maybe van Gogh would've said the profane is no less
profound than the sacred—
only more wounded.

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Copyright © 2023 Carmen Germain All rights reserved
from Life Drawing
MoonPath Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission