PDF

Wheatfield with Cypresses. van Gogh


by Jerry Ratch



There's no sky like that
with twisting clouds shot up into by cypress
trees that are so like dark green flames
leaping out of the earth as if a dark green
oily pool were on fire underground,
and this was all that could escape, was
its essence.

And all across the bottom,
a plain, a ripe wheatfield bent this way
and that with riffs of the wind, the wheat
so ripe by now as to be directly edible.

The rest, some blue and purple
lumps for hills, not that different from
clouds. And then green spinach

and a gnarled tree or two that have known
the earth and fear the sky.
Endcap