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Van Gogh

All right, I love him for the way
he painted Vermilion! Orange! jagged as
shouts, and when no one bought them,
no one even listened,
he shouted louder,
Sunflowers! Self-Portrait!
and years later, not one sold,
he cut off his own ear.

Then he had to bring it back on canvas
hundreds of times,
in the brass swelling
of the bell
that called him to dinner,
in the complicated iris
at the end of the asylum path.
Think how stooping
at the fork in the road
he might have seen a stone-shaped ear,
how the human heart,
once it knows what it needs,
will find it everywhere, how
in the curve of his delicately padded cell
one starry night, he must have murmured
everything he had ever wanted to say
straight into the ear of God.

COPYRIGHT 2003 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group