I.
Smooth silky serpentine
Swirl of the tongue
Of the brush
Around and over under
Just up over the back of my ear
Wet
Salacious
Voluminous
Tickling me with
Color-saturation

Vibrant forceful virile
Thing
Like the crest of a wave
Overtaking you
Turning you over and around
In its insides
Like a lick of fire
Singeing the hairs on your neck
Yet you are inside the wet
Inside the insides
Like pins pricking
and daggers dragging
spilling your blood into the
mixture until
you are both
Inside Outside
Consumed Consuming
and we are dancing
swimming
rolling
fucking
eating each other alive

II.
You roll me around in your mouth
like nothing
like tumbleweed on rolling hills
and I fall deep into your chasms
and I bounce
Flying -
Fiercely -
Over your peaks

with long, wet, heavy seaweed arms
you wrap around me
and pull me over under into
your water dreams
the surface of which
impacts me with a bruising
strength
A slap in the
face
in the body

I’d go tumbling backwards
but your tendrils
yank me through
as though fastened to my
skeleton directly

There is no escape
From you
As you apply me to your canvas
Like paste
And string me through
Your fingers
I am your liquid color

And you will shape me use me
At your will
You layer me on thick
Or let me just barely drift on
Stretching
Till there is nothing left but a drop
A trace left
And then I am gone

You fill me
You buoy me
And then unravel me
into
nothing more
than
a sigh

I wrote the above poem just over two years ago, in reaction to these paintings. It was the first time Vincent elicited poetry from me, and it would not be the last. In fact, it is my favorite way to respond to him. Or as I once put it, I write back to him.

What some people do not know about Vincent, and something I surely did not know, was that he was a voracious reader. In one letter from June of 1880 he compares writing and painting, as he saw them as linked, and perhaps two of the highest art forms.

But you see, there are several things that are to be believed and to be loved; there’s something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare and something of Correggio or Sarto in Michelet, and something of Delacroix in V. Hugo, and in Beecher Stowe there’s something of Ary Scheffer. And in Bunyan there’s something of M. Maris or of Millet, a reality more real than reality, so to speak, but you have to know how to read him; then there are extraordinary things in him, and he knows how to say inexpressible things; and then there’s something of Rembrandt in the Gospels or of the Gospels in Rembrandt, as you wish, it comes to more or less the same, provided that one understands it rightly, without trying to twist it in the wrong direction, and if one bears in mind the equivalents of the comparisons, which make no claim to diminish the merits of the original figures.

If now you can forgive a man for going more deeply into paintings, admit also that the love of books is as holy as that of Rembrandt, and I even think that the two complement each other. [full letter]

The first time I really saw Vincent nearly four years ago in the Musée d’Orsay, my instinctive reaction was that we saw the world similarly, and that… as ballsy as it may sound, I write like he paints. I think what I really saw was that we had similar spirits and similar goals with our work. A passionate, spiritual non-fiction, if you will. For Vincent insisted on always painting from life, in fact on occasion he destroyed paintings that he had not painted from life because of that very fact. Except for the short period of time where Gauguin convinced him to do otherwise, Vincent was a man of the actual, the real, but also about reaching something higher… I have always felt the same about my poetry and my prose. And so, in this project, I try to reflect Vincent. I try to exchange paint for words.

I hope you enjoyed the poem, Reader. Now, I return back to my sisyphean task (as least that’s how it often feels) of composing a first draft of my play by the end of the month. I think I can in fact do it, but it will take an enormous amount of effort this week.

So, I speak to myself and to all my fellow artists out there now when I say… onwards!

Although you were forced out of Arles, you came here under your own will. Although you were restless and lonely, you also found yourself at peace in these hallways. No one prodded or provoked you, you had space to paint (they gave you two rooms), and you had nature all around.

Walking up the stairs to your bedroom, I felt my heart flutter a bit. I had not been inside a room where you had lived since Auvers, since the room that also provided your death bed. I was nervous, actually…

Upon entering, I faced the window, and that open window beckoned me with a warm, caressing breeze. The view and the light were so alluring, I almost forgot the bars on them completely.

And yes: there was your view. There was your reaper’s field, the reaper you painted so often here, the reaper with whom I identify so deeply. Teresa means reaper, harvester; and often I feel I am reaping your wheat, Vincent.

Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun (late June, 1889)

Almost completely lost in the yellow. And glancing right, yes, the Appilles in their bizarre formation, with their unique curves that doubtless many attribute to “Van Gogh’s madness”… Yet it is nature herself that defies the viewer here.

I glanced down again at these old, metal bars. These rusty, dirty bars. And the wheat behind, flourishing.

I remembered what you wrote:

Ah, I’ll never be able to render my impressions of certain figures I’ve seen here. Certainly the road to the south is the road where there’s something brand new, but men of the north have difficulty in getting through. And I can see myself already in advance, on the day when I have some success, longing for my solitude and distress here when I see the reaper in the field below through the iron bars of the isolation cell. Every cloud has a silver lining. (10 September 1889 to Theo)

Yes, a certain amount of solitude and distress were desirable to you, made you a painting locomotive. Bars could not limit your vision or hinder your progress. What could, of course, was your illness — still undiagnosed to this day. What led you, every few months, to have hallucinations, to black out completely, is unknown. But what we do know is that the attacks were always followed by long periods of recovery, in which you could not paint. So, you see Reader: madness and art were not brothers, but enemies. In fact, in his letters it often seems that he paints as a means of curing himself. And when he was well, he would say he felt his head more clear than ever before in his life.

In the room, I wonder what is real. I imagine your bare feet on these tiles when you awake, and your hand opening the window pane.

I went out into my wheatfield, your reaper, and sat here under this precious tree and wrote until the twilight left my shoulders.

When it was finally time to leave I noticed the enormous cypress near the entrance. The tree, like a flame, like a spirit shooting for the sun, called out.

Vincent on cypresses:

Until now I have not been able to do them as I feel them; the emotions that grip me in front of nature can cause me to lose consciousness, and then follows a fortnight during which I cannot work. (February 1890, to critic Aurier)

And yet, Vincent, you quite often do the same for me.