I. Theo
Opening again the arrant
correspondence—
relief of the sown fields,
bread of affliction:
a restless brother burns
his way to harvest,
painting space as thing,
as woodcut furious,
flinders of fire and leaf,
heavy, sun-dense strokes,
dark notes dealing
for fugitive effects;
a red brother working
petitions for more room,
more light, aches of vision
given the gleaning, its price:
close the correspondence—
which love deserving silence
which brothers, being
divided, unrelieved.
II. Gauguin
A sunburned man wants all the smoke.
Hot with other people’s fire
he hustles into the landscape—
priced and pricing,
stupid with passion—
not a woman alive
he has not cornered at a party,
crossing the yellow space,
orange in arrangement,
gleaning bodies, pressing
the plucked flowers
parched into the spine.
With subjects smarting,
russet and resistant
before the sketch, the hands are thrown.
Scrimmaging weak in borrowed air
the artist affected excuses
himself before the colors dry.
A trade wind only blows hot.
A cut man only paints with knives.
III. Roulin
The last dispatches arriving,
there was air in the parting.
Who has not wished
for different lights—
a stronger, stranger sun?
A standing man huge
at his appointment
works; who has not
a southward sickness,
roaming addresses,
setting out notes for all people,
country cakes for the rural
gods? His post his song
his route his bricolage—
bouquet of beard sunblasted
man ranging local fields
holds peace about the arms,
who would save words
with stricken company,
sit for a friend.
IV. Jo
Dealing with broken men
she wears her ministry
like hard lace—serious and fresh
in union, in lonely suffrage living
braced, weight of the caretaker
without referent—good, unrevered,
read up on the going looks she hustles
to convince convincing men—
their awful, distinctive calm dulling
a landscape to its uncrewed sop,
ploughing doubts that choke the sower raw.
But a sun-singed woman, knowing the work
of the committed, works: pitching,
veering, steeled and steady, she tacks
into the bazaar, arranging the remains,
raking the light, opening the strokes,
the correspondences, declaring what is,
is not for sale. The familial tones—
alone she wears them whole against the sun’s
dividing heat, reclaims the fields, the harvest.