Van Gogh

Cypress trees, delirious, line the road
His fluid hand walks. The sky and mountains
Melt into blue obscurity, and wake
The cool moon out of tinted shifting clouds
Above the rippling carpet of the grove
Where crippled olives bend and intertwine.
He stumbles on the winding track that falls
Like a stream over curling hills, and leads
The way down to the glowing town below.
Bone-tired and reeling from the road he finds
Himself among the clink of glass on glass,
The radiating orbs of lamps that float
Above a throbbing yellow wooden floor.
Each object in the room is lurid, raw,
With black outlines and fighting captive tones
That burn from prisons, painted on the walls,
And fry his fevered eyes with every look.
He sighs and props his frame against the bar,
A hawk's skull wrapped in crêpe, a ginger beard,
An antiseptic smell, a battered coat,
The emerald poison he pours down his throat,
Which makes the tactile world a crowded mess
Of colours swirling, objects changing place
And rushing in towards him, falling back
To resume their places, vivid and still,
Alive to his command, his brush, his will.

His temple a beating drum, he breathes in
The warm air of the tranquil summer night,
With quiet starlight hanging overhead.
The leaking from the lamps across the bay
Is blurred and looks like spreading fire,
And drops as burning ether to the ground,
Lighting gently on the lapping water.
With hurried steps among sleeping houses
He finds his way back through uncertain streets
To stair, and lamp, and blue-walled room,
His sturdy wooden bed, the creaking floor,
His wicker chair, his china water-jug,
All outlined, wavering in pastel shades
And flat, lit softly by the open door,
Calling him to rest his spinning head.
But he is frantic, strides across the room
And flings the window open wide to see
The sky, alive with strange fantastic light
That eddies in a thousand melting pools,
And streams in milky channels, curving back
To meet the blackness of the crazy night —
Amoebic tendrils, quavering orbs that split
And fuse into flashing patterns of flame,
Shimmering waves of burning dust
That flare in green and blue across the hills,
Blinding prophetic fire, a hundred suns,
The moon, the mother, spreading glowing gold;
His mind, alive, electric, has been touched
By the bright aura of a midnight hand.

Two years have passed, his aching soul has slipped
From luminous inspiration to pain,
Dull wanderings beneath a stormy sky.
On a dark day of tortured thoughts and rain
He walks into the fields of swaying wheat,
Black crows, black clouds, the thunder of July,
He takes a steady breath and plants his feet —
He turns the pistol to his chest and fires.
In the last moments of his fleeting life
A fragile light breaks through the closing door:
Il dit "La tristesse durera toujours."