Starry Night Over the Rhone

 

Paging through the Taschen compendium of Van Gogh’s complete works a couple of weeks ago, it brought up a poem that will appear in the new book, The Next World (out in January 2025) from Shanti Arts.

 

I have a memory from the the end of second grade where I am standing in the Musee D’Orsay (it may have been the Jeu de paume back then), mostly bored, and suddenly found myself in front of one of Van Gogh’s star-oriented paintings: Starry Night over The Rhone.

 

Starry Night - ink sketch/study

 

And something happened.

 

There is something that happens to me, probably to most of us, when we encounter a work of art that speaks to us. I usually call it an “illuminating the nervous system” moment, when everything inside me suddenly lights up. Sometimes it’s a cool light, sometimes it’s a warm light. I like to believe that I walked away from that painting inexplicably changed.

 

For years, I believed the painting had been the more famous Starry Night that is now in the MET. 

 

 

But when I was writing the poem I did some research and found that the only one with starry patterns that would have been in Paris during my childhood was the Rhone painting. Interesting. When I found this out, I began to question the memory itself.

The memory was vivid, and yet…

 

Starry Night Over The Rhone, 1889

 

Starry Night Over the Rhone

(by Vincent Van Gogh)

 

Harsh yellow gaslight sent gold ribbons across the Rhone.

I followed those ribbons up into Ursa Major’s seven

 

aquamarine-soft haloes: seeing as spinning out every-

where threads of light. Look: the hands, green stars.

 

Look: the heart, gold gas. I was eight and I heard him

say: night is richer in color than the day. I was eight, and

 

for one second, maybe two, I knew someone else who

sensed night in the same way. And I reached up, almost

 

touched the thick paint, and for one second, maybe two,

my muscles were freed from fear, could articulate how

 

dark and light feed, and are fed. I stood on my toes and

made starlit ripples in the air, mimicked the feedback

 

loop between my finger bones and distant star-gas threads.

And I saw the couple, almost in shadow, maybe an after-

 

thought, maybe in love, at the bottom of the painting,

walking back to their hotel, to get out from under that

 

intense mirror of their hearts, hands, eyes. And I knew,

for one second, maybe two, that there is no escape, no

 

matter what we do. Is this memory true? Night is richer

in color than the day.

 

(This poem originally appeared in The Wilderness House)

 

Night is richer in color than the day. The quote from Vincent came from a letter that he sent to his brother, Theo, while he was painting Starry Night Over The Rhone. It can be found in Vincent Van Gogh, The Complete Paintings (Taschen, 2020).

 

 

The Autumn People

 

Below, the poem

The Autumn People. 

 

Cover of The Autumn People by Ray Bradbury

It will be in a new book,

The Next World,

coming out from Shanti Arts Publishing

in January 2025.

It is a “persona” poem.

Meaning: a poem written in an assumed voice, a character. 

This character experiences the world in a slightly hallucinatory 

way, or maybe they see things as they really are…

 

Beirut

 

And so....

The Autumn People

1.

 

I catch the orange glow of their cigarettes out beyond

the tracks in late Fall: all those we’ve killed in so many

 

of our wars, those caught in our furious crossfire, our

vicious metallic arguments with ourselves. I hear them

 

pad down to the river at night with zinc buckets to get

water for coffee, to keep them awake, vigilant. They

 

may be dead but they are still wary of us. Each footfall

is soft as the shift of a fin below the river’s surface.

 

2.

 

They have been gathering their forces, waiting patiently

until they have enough mass to rush the city, shut down

 

the grid, the water, stop traffic, grind the tired economy

to a halt, eliminate sleep. (Maybe it’s already happened:

 

Insomnia has built a strong following here.) Sometimes

they steal into the city in twos and threes, rummage

 

recycling bins, clink glass jars together to find the perfect

sound that will bring all the walls and bridges down.

 

3.

 

They have a saying they pass on to the newly dead in their

camps. I hear it lying awake at night: everything is happening

 

at once. I can feel it’s truth. Everything is happening at once.

There are moments when I believe they have already stormed

 

the city, that it’s already over. Last night on my rounds I passed

a body sleeping (or dead) beneath a thin blanket. The wind

 

lifted the frayed corner. I saw a hand, relaxed. Me, I welcome

the invasion, a revelation of secrets the dead will reveal.

 

4.

 

This morning, impatient, I went out to them, crossed the tracks,

waded through high grass, into the line of trees beside the river,

 

to tell them that it’s time, everything’s cracking and breaking

apart of its own accord, and it may only take a breath, a whisper,

 

a nudge, to shut everything down, start anew. On a mud bank,

I found two men, talking over each other, full of rapid-fire

 

meth-inspired words, focused on how to fix a bike so they

could sell it, the fantastic things they would do with the cash…

  

(The Autumn People was previously published in Cholla Needles)

 

 

 ***************************************************

 

I wrote The Autumn People in the fall of 2022,

addressing the horror and shame arising 

from decades of looking into the abyss created 

by of one of the main US exports to the world:

violence via weapons manufacturing.

 

More about US Weapons and Consequences (Death Tolls) in a

 previous blog, found here. 

 

 

 

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