Wheel of Color, Wheel of Lights

Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied
honest victories over desperation.
—Thomas Merton on “The Starry Night”
and the paintings of van Gogh

The stars making their way
as fiery wheels turn, whirlpools of brightness

sweep across a night sky, haloed, jewel-like,
constellations cartwheel and spin,

celestial explosions of concentric power,
their long passages burning back from darkness.

Clouds of great lights surge through a fathomless deep,
and night floats above undulating hills.

Fields ripple with a fluid, rhythmic pulse
as dark lights disappear, passing over into what morning brings

with its illusive, first, white ray of light
igniting every painting, creeping over a slip of horizon,

radiating its purity across the fields and hills
of a little piece of French countryside.

And the sun, like all protagonists, reaches its zenith
until never resting it descends,

part of an all-encompassing path,
where it became your agony,

a heart overflowing, a heart continually broken,
abandoned to a Provence sky,

a whole vibrating, sun-drenched landscape
pouring out of your canvas bright and intact:

farm lands bordered by roads, fences and trees,
harvesters working in wine red seas of ripening vines,

faceless stick figures walking side by side down country lanes,
orchards blossoming, fields swaying with flowers

and bursting wheat splashed by light,
kissed by a showering of the day’s brilliance

in an eternal spring and summer of color.

Prophecies

The best way to know God is to love
many things.
—Vincent van Gogh

Eyes in self-portraits,
all-consuming,
calling out in silence
to a desperate muse.

Trees standing off
alone, like human figures,
crippled, black-torched,
spectral.

Who could see
in the murk of those first pictures
with their subdued browns,
dismal flat farmhouses,
overcast skies,
what was to come—
painting as a pulse of light,
each color its own essence
and experience,
the eloquence of sunlight
passing through almond trees,
how it plays in every branch,
every blossom struck,
illuminations of heightened color
and contrast?

Following the sun
you came to harvest time
as it faithfully arrived
burning in an endless flow—
reapers working blazing fields,
sowers forging solitary paths,
diggers dutifully bound
breaking difficult ground.

Pilgrim artist
setting out to see
in a pair of boots, worn out,
weather-beaten, true friends
on this holy journey
occasioned by
the most commonplace—
restless wanderings
to find your work.

Pool halls, clocks
and gaslights waver
through dreary time,
lonely hours in a night café.
A scene of crime and forgetting,
savageries in orange, green and red,
jarring chromatic schemes.
Here it is staring out—
the powers of darkness
colliding with a brightness
violent in intensity,
red walls screaming down
at a curtained, inner doorway,
endless passageway.

The church in Auvers,
with its bruised background,
black and cobalt blue,
foreground tipping into daylight—
disquieted but not yet toppled over,
leaning tenuously
to listen under troubled skies.

Vision,
the act of looking,
seeing itself, a sacrament
being offered up to the broken
and forgotten.

Portrait of a doctor
in this present age,
as he drifts off,
ironically smiling,
tilted and sad.

A pipe as personal token,
a pair of empty chairs
arranged in hope
of good conversation—
in a room, in a house,
in a vernacular of all yellow.

Howling cypresses
spiraling upward flame-like
in their anguish,
exploding, earthbound—
swirling stars in roiling exaltation,
a tree’s dark spire
and the turning of night.

Picture café lights,
a night’s decoration
hung across the sky,
a starlit vision
with its treasury of stars.

That blast of sun
across fields of light,
extending out over something big,
something infinite,
a limitless, open plain—
an unbroken thread
and clear path, colors lifting
up into the sky,
stretching out
over a great divide,
a line of color, a horizon
unlocking
heaven and earth.

Summer Wheat

What is drawing? It is working oneself
through an invisible iron wall that seems
to stand between what one feels and
what one can do.
—Vincent van Gogh

Wheat fields
stretch out rich and thick,
torsos of men and women,
a ballet of waves,
arms swinging to the rhythm
of their work.

Sunset is
one great ember
in a skyline displaying
its particular miracles:
clouds, red sky, sun, firmament,
a great sheltering tree,
cottages in the distance.

There’s something
hallowed that descends
upon the day,
after one, like these harvesters,
has worked long and well.

The sun,
a fiery furnace—
sulfurous, roiling, hallucinogenic,
embryonic, godlike.

My innermost powers
ebb and flow,
rolling in and out
with the heat in waves,
full of half-starved ecstasies,
artistic raptures, virile perseverance,
the vibrancy of observed reality.

Painted figures
on my canvas
struggle to come alive,
as if they were waking themselves
from a long, dreadful,
heavy sleep.

Standing outside,
my shirt sleeves rolled up,
watching until the dark’s
own delicious textures
reveal themselves.

Painting the living world,
I live a separated life,
a little addled,
closest to calm back in my room,
sinking into a tilted bed,
shutting my eyes,
still reaching out past
the nightstand
and glowing window
toward a world melting
in darkness, toward a light
I’m burning to find.

Struck down by color
another dream passes,
picturing it all again;
my mind still lit,
lost in sleep,
the light slowly
burning down.

The end of all fire
is ashes.