“A straw hat on, my eyes flushed, might I resemble the former
preacher who painted a pool table and then maimed himself?”
— Rush Rankin (Descanso Beach Club)

The seaweed bends with the ocean, a field of women
kneeling, then standing row upon row, as if to offer
a benediction to the shore. Already I forget I am
floating in this frigid Catalina water,
not some ghost surveying southern France—
nor an ominous crow or a half-mad painter
scanning a landscape after a pint of absinthe—
A boat circles above me, the black chain from its anchor
stretches like an umbilical cord to the blanched florets
of coral below. The motor hums. A large woman peers
over the side as I ascend, her distorted contours
growing in and out of focus—and I am free,
more so than Van Gogh waking in Saint Rémy,
a dark habit caressing his cheek.

“Je voudrai mettre dans le tableau mon appréciation, mon amour que j’ai pour lui.”
— Vincent Van Gogh, to Theo (Arles, The Yellow House)

I want to paint a friend whose hair grows wild
like grain that leans toward thunder: days
half-spent the way a nightingale must blaze
with song because the night itself is riled
inside its chest. He will be golden-haired —
a harvest sheared and gathered from the bone,
and I shall press into the oils my own
dark gratitude, the love I never spared.
But love is color breaking discipline, burned
from yellow ochre into molten light —
to orange that cracks the ebbing noon in two,
to chrome and spinning citron forced to turn
like suns around his brow. I strike from sight
the petty room — and daub infinities of blue.