van gogh

I’d taken myself up a tree, for the ground
had been pulling magnetic fields on the blood
and I’d wanted to hear the stars. And round
the mottled path he shuffled, footsteps muffled
by winking drops in the grass. His hands –
Clasped, his face all dip and shadow and eyes cast down
He moved with granite in bones and I,
I welcomed his granite for I can make feathers of stones.

With easel and brush he stood, paused
in his time, in his tunnel. I asked
What of the stillness, the grey in your cause?
He told me that grey had settled on skin like carbon fumes
over the years and smudged with his tears
as his world had stuck blow upon blow on itself
and the landscapes he mirrored weren’t dead -
They just weren’t alive.

"Put down your easel, your oils and your brush,
for you shall not paint 'till you are not blind
Stop looking so hard, instead try to see;
not with your eyes! You must see with your mind
A bespectacled man told me once that the world
is whatever you make of it, but I
know him to be wrong, there's just more to the world
than a blinkered soul can find."

The film stretched taught across his eye,
loosened to water' the skin
creasing like coffee-stained curtains; his hands
like hover-birds quivered uncertain
I took them,
traced all the roughly sewn lines
the pulse of the artist, the blood beat behind.

"To the house on the hill!
Come with me now, to the place where the heavens
and Earth stood still!
To the place I first Heard,
To the place I first Saw,
To the place of my calling; the scratch at the door
where They whisper the secrets
of universe, nature, and all.

I'l show you them now,
I'l show you the truth,
I'l show you the what and the why and the how
I'l hand you the reason,
I'l give you the proof
To the house on the hill, come with me now."