Once in a while my memory of having written something intersects with my ability to find it. I wrote this about Vincent van Gogh in 2003, beside a lake in Kansas. Which is relevant only in that it shows we all carry each other into all kinds of places.

Vincent (in gratitude)

Cedars twist in spirals toward and against the water colored skies of middle earth,
lit by the unencumbered light of afternoon sun,
their green boughs becoming blue, then clear, then one with
the air.

Sunflowers bow and bless, and another dances while still another, with others,
faces the cedar-filled sunshine and sea-blueness becomes light,
and reflects in all the directions of the wind the golden yellow essence
found elsewhere only on the legs of bees.

There’s a farmer now, and his wife, tired backs perceived beneath work-wrinkled muslin,
gathering potatoes in their hands and absorbing the colors they are immersed in,
trying to keep them in the gray grasp of their toil,
but unable to,
thank God, unable to.

Vincent, like a candle, lit the darkness of their lives,
and sent the colors on beyond them, on beyond himself,
on beyond the calendars and clocks that would have marked their appearance
in the black ink of crushed linen papers ensconced in piled ledgers
in a cellar somewhere in the Loire,
had anyone besides Vincent,
seen them..