GINA FUCHS

Van Gogh Making Wheatfield under Thunderclouds

Today he thinks about healthy, fortifying flowers
And dirt sown, calm melting into hollow, whistling hours

Things getting pushed away by the wind alone
Having died after they've grown. Later they're dried

On the canvas and his brother cries, clouds made of cream-colored oils
Melting into linen like noise against sky leaving one to wonder

If he knew which day he'd never dirty a last smock
Or write another letter. Three more large canvases hang dry

Nailed into concrete bordering the room vast stretches
Of corn under troubled skies. I wonder what it means to be so alone

That soft flesh can shatter like glass around bone. Delicate yellow,
Delicate soft green, and blue, too grandiose, too calm too much unknown

Left in between. With no one else around, he talks,
There is something like hope living in the stalks.

By mechanical, rectangular patches in the grass
There's a reminder he used his hands to cross-stitch hashes,

Space for wheat and life that never sprouts, and nothing else breaks
Through the dirt. And where the white brush strokes meet the sky

They bend into a tornado or the start of a tornado, or the quiet resolve
After a gunshot or goodbye, an indescribable expanse

That's far too grand, No, they are just the broad strokes
Of his shaking hand.