Clearly.

van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890


Wheatfield with Crows

(July 29th, 1890)

here is the last, impasto

sky, heavy as

stone, a terrible

hypoxic blue, as if the gods

themselves have been strangled

by their own chains; crows

screaming like newborns, they rise

like the discolored blooms

of weightless, dying

flowers, releasing

the secret of love’s inception, from the toxic

fumes of extinguished desire, fading

against the whitewashed

horizon, until they completely

disappear into clouds, haphazardly

smeared as a child’s

finger painting.

For one who found salvation, not

in the visible, palpable truths that often

waver and acclimate to the fluctuating

reality of an endless

amount of suns and skies, but instead, who saw

it clearly

in the imperciptable, ante-meridian shadows

of the Saint’s cloistered soul,

it was only right that it be

the brightest day of summer, when all

reason and evidnece of our profane

humainty and the folly of our vulgar

exhalations are undeniably

fixed like a sadness that has seeped

into the deepest parts of your being,

when you saw the last light, blinding

as the first.

But with this blindness comes the vision

that is impossible to depict, with even the rarest,

and most resplendent

pigments. Long after the paint is dried

and crumbles from the canvas like scabs from forgotten

wounds, these secret passages, these paths

in the wheat, worn down by the weight of a thousand other

skies, and seared into the eternal landscape

of immeasurable

other lives, will never fade

or burn. The path will always

be there. It has no

beginning, and

no end.

- Adam Stanley

Thank you, Mme. Scherzo.