Poem: Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888)

“Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888)”

I bet you’re surprised

I didn’t pick a Dali.

Salvador Dali,

Surrealism personified,

Poet of the subconscious.

But Van Gogh

Is poet of the stars,

Who knew that life was pale, blunt, sun-warped, depthless color

And zigzags, hard lines—

The barriers that we put up

To protect against those who

Love and Hate

Us.

But Van Gogh also knows

That life is the endless night.

She swallows us in an endless depth of color

And frees us.

We catapult faster than a cannonball,

Ever so slowly

Through seas of deep navy that know no time.

There the cool waves lap gently against our skin.

There we can drink Gatsby’s “incomparable milk of wonder,”

Warm like the comfort of a mother’s bosom,

But refreshingly cool like the wisdom of old age.

Here there is no line, no barrier between light and dark, between us and others:

We are vulnerable, but we are invincible,

There is simply the oneness

Of our beings.

A miniscule couple stands on the water in Arles.

The Rhone is only a river,

But they hear the Sea pulsing with quiet, endless strength,

Smell its salty spray.

The Sea means Forever.

And with the energetic twinkle of the gas streetlights bouncing off their eyes,

They say, “You are my forever. I belong to you.”

But what they mean is,

“I belong

To the Universe.”

Their dark, layered clothing

Restricts them.

But why be restricted

When no natural order governs the world?

The sailboats are swallowed by the river,

The hay they hold looks no different

Than the gaslights playing off the water.

Nothing is its own.

The man’s tiny hat

Matches the hay

Whose crunch means harvest, fall, death.

But it also matches the reflection of the newfangled gaslights

Who mean invention, (intellectual) rebirth,

Whose constant, manmade glow

Make the luminous splendor of our heavenly home

Tangible,

For once,

On Earth.

The stars,

Powerful denizens of the dark, endless heavens,

Are tiny wisps of dandelion,

Whose puffy form signal autumn,

But who glow with the greenness of youthful seed and spring.

The sky,

The wide expanse which God has thrown about the Earth—

In Van Gogh’s impressionist style—

Becomes a confined wall of blue bricks.

And that is why this Starry Night Over the Rhone

Is a meditation on man’s own incomparable tininess

And the deep navy of God’s awesome power,

On how we have only to look up

To “dream,”

To float at peace through the bright and murky depths of the Universe,

To know no barriers against nature, others and ourselves,

To be one with our Creator,

To live His Dream.

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^That's the link to the image. :p