Touching Van Gogh

Touching Van Gogh


Do as I say and not as I do,
Touching old masters is no good for you

Summer day at MoMA,
Wandering air-conditioned rooms,
We had drifted apart,
  When I found myself wandering into
Van Gogh’s Starry Night, its
  Vanity bonfire raking high a sky divine
With its off center green flames,
  Mimicking French cypress or yew

Flat photos do it no justice,
  It’s 3D, like a stucco wall,
Licks of paint rise to the eye, blue points
  Of windswept waves draw the sea so high

I was tempted,
There’s a security guard in the doorway!
  He just walked by, he’s gone now

With a shot of adrenaline I pointed my finger at the stars
  And reaching,tentative as Michelangelo’s Adam, poked it,
A rising triangle of Van Gogh’s brushstroke,
  It was Sharp!  It hurt!
I recoiled, inspecting the finger, found no blood,
Yet alert as from being lanced at a doctors office
  I hadn’t known I’d visited,
It had bit me! And next, would it want to chew my ear off?
  None in the room bore witness

So there I stood, as close to Van Gogh as he to his work,
  Sharing that goose of stimulant and ennui,
Pre-dawn cold anxious depression shakes,
  Such as I hadn’t had since before McLean,
We both, standing as one red headed Dutchman, sculpting wee sailboats
  As the pixel points of space,
  Far out, far out of town

He shared his view through his asylum window,
His roiling mistral vision, enlarging the stars in its clarity,
White rolling waves over the breakwater of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence,
  Which, by any name, we’ve come to know, as
That last starlit light, of the artist’s angry night