Van Gogh Dreams

…Cat corpses are turning up almost every day.

— the Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2003

     I was planting zinnias in my front yard in the middle of the day, full sun, no shade at all, and thinking of Van Gogh. How he threw himself heart and soul into the earth. How he saw landscapes with skies all pink. How faith cheats us.

     I was struck by death, by immortality.

     I couldn’t see my way out of my own head.

     Denny, my across the street neighbor, sat on the porch between potted jungle plants reading the paper and smoking. A black and white cat climbed up his shirt. The tail whisked him in the face. He watched me, balanced on the back two legs of a chair.

     The cat wrapped its tail around Denny’s neck like a feather boa. He nodded at me, exposed me. And I was taken by a little thrill of shame.

     Twenty-three cups of coffee. Lunch for a franc. A window. A madhouse. Peach tree in bloom. Iris. A plane of olives. The sky Prussian blue. The wheat fields gold beneath the sun.

     The magnificence of Arles!

     Blazing. Brilliant. Beauty slivering his veins. Splintering in his blood. Ribboning his flesh. Eating him. Consuming him. What does he do?

     Here, Vincent says. He places the lobe of his ear in the prostitute’s palm and closes her fingers over the blood spilling over.

     Late afternoon, I walked three blocks to the park and sat on the grass with my legs wide and my head bowed, not praying but thinking about praying. Cars passed in front of me. An ant fumbled across my thigh. Bees hovered in a patch of clover. The thinking wasn’t going anywhere and I was wondering about God and why he doesn’t say anything anymore. This is both what I was thinking and feeling so guilty for thinking that I was trying to make it stop when I felt a mist of water on the back of my neck. It wasn’t raining and, anyway, this mist was too fine to have fallen very far and, for a minute, I couldn’t figure it out. Then I looked up and there was a sparrow on a branch budding out with salmon-colored blossoms. The sparrow was shaking it wings and gutter water was falling on my head as if sprinkled by the hand of a priest. I hadn’t wanted to think about it that way. It was all too metaphorical. Too cute. Well, I thought, and then it occurred to me that maybe God never quits talking. Maybe all I really want is for God to shut up shut up shut up.

     I sat beneath my window and watched, late into the slab of night, for Denny and the cat. The moon rose above the stricken trees. A shadow moved in the bushes.

     On the top floor of the apartment building next to Denny’s house, a woman stood in her window. Her form wobbled in the yellow light and I began to feel as if I were drowning—as if the world turned too fast on its axis.

     I clipped the mountains from the horizon. I followed their black border with a pair of scissors. I took a paper punch to the moon. I lifted the clouds with the sticky side of tape. And then I pasted all of it, everything, to my body. The moon on my breast and the mountains and that familiar shade of hazy purple washing over all the constellations of my skin—

     I know where I am in this fleshy landscape.

     Denny said, “I sure enjoy your flowers. I can see them all the way from my window. What are they, daisies?”

     “Zinnias,” I said.

     “Beautiful.”

     “Where’s your cat?” I said, though I could see its shadow stretched out across the grass at the base of the maple tree.

     Denny looked around as if lost, “Hunh,” he said. “Got me.”

     Like a magic trick, the cat’s head appeared from behind the trunk.

     But it didn’t fool me.

     The cat hung around at the back fence. Watching. Waiting. I set a bowl of milk out beneath my bedroom window.

     The milk sat untouched, and I went to bed. I was thinking, lying there looking at the ceiling, about how the cat is a study in opposition: black and white. Saturation of color. The absence of color. I began to understand night and day. Yin and yang. Good and evil.

     And then I could not quit thinking about life and death. I thought about it coursing through the cat’s veins. The ebb and flow. It made me hungry in more ways than one. I was thirsty. I was lonely. I thought of Van Gogh licking his brush between strokes on the canvas. How the starry night burned inside his body. Embers of paint burrowing through his flesh, and when he cut off his ear a dazzling blaze of pure light streamed out like the Milky Way across the indigo sky.

     Luminescence. Evanescence. Glowing creatures—bits of light cast across the inky sea.

     Oh…there’s nothing really to explain it. Nothing that comes close enough.

Arles, 1888

I have two new studies like these: a meadow full of very yellow buttercups, a ditch with iris plants with green leaves and purple flowers, the town in the background, a few gray willows - a strip of blue sky.

If they don’t mow the meadow I’d like to do this study again, for the subject was very beautiful, and I had some trouble finding the composition. A little town surrounded by fields completely blooming with yellow and purple flowers; you know, a

dream.

     Two children are lost in a yellow meadow of flowers. I spend the night on a blanket stitched of purple thistle. There’s a red city, a quiet city, far away in the distance.

     An owl flies silently just above the buttercups and God hitches up his robes and squats next to me. Hi God, I say. Hey there pal.

     I wake up early. The color of the sky is the color of a blind man’s eyes. God is gone. I look behind a maple, a row of apple trees. I meander the ditch bank, weaving through the tangled iris.

     The children are in a furrow in the middle of the meadow. One is dead. Flies swarm inside his nostrils. The bigger child, a girl, chews her lip like a cow chewing cud.

     The dead child is beautiful stretched out in the dirt. His golden hair. His skin the faint blue of morning. Bunches of clover sway in the breeze, casting purple shadows over the curves of him and it makes me want to look and look for the meaning of it—

     for the message. for the moral. for the God in his flesh.

     I was deadheading zinnias when Denny sneaked up behind me.

     “Hey there, neighbor,” he said.

     “Whoa,” I said and spun on my toes with a dead blossom pinched between my thumb and index finger. I was squatting low to the ground and Denny towered over me. “Hey. Hi. You startled me,” I said and flipped the zinnia onto the grass. It broke apart into a hundred pieces.

     “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. Just thought we’d come over and say hello.” That’s when I saw the cat peeking out from behind Denny’s legs. I was nearly eye level with it and couldn’t look away. The cat’s tail inched up Denny’s calf as if it were a separate animal and Denny reached down and gathered the cat in his arms. He rubbed his face into its fur and mumbled some gibberish that embarrassed me, A grown man!

     Was I jealous? Because I hurt for that cat. I wanted to hold it so badly I was in physical pain. Not the tender, sad pain of love, but—I can’t say this without sounding perverse—the pain of Lust.

     Raw. Toothy. An open wound.

*

     At the park, the salmon colored blossoms were shriveled up and falling in handfuls from the trees. I looked up and the leaves of the tree were so full and green they filled the spaces in between branches and I could no longer see the sky. I expected to see the bird. I fully expected it. I’m so often, with no justification, certain.

     Take Denny, for example. He will, I am sure, love me soon enough.

     He will, I am sure, hate me too late.

     Blazing. Brilliant. Beauty slivering his veins. Splintering in his blood. Ribboning his flesh. Eating him. Consuming him. What does he do?

     He places the lobe of his ear in a handkerchief. He folds the corners of the cloth over the blood seeping through the weave. Here, he says. He hands his gift to Rachel, the prostitute.

     It was dark, black. I woke to the cat lapping at the milk just beneath my head. I imagined its little pink tongue slipping between its teeth, nibbling at the sweet milk. I closed my eyes and felt the tickle of its tongue in the skin between my fingers, the crook of my elbow, in the crease between my thigh and hip. The moon flew up above the mountains, and the cat licked and licked as pleasantly as small talk. I touched my stomach and the cat mewed. The bowl skittered across the cement, and the cat leapt into the shadows.

     And then I had nothing. My hands were empty. My mouth open. Night was distant, a gray I had no name for, a lack of color. My body slipped away around me. My flesh rose to the listless clouds in the listless sky. The sick moon. The stale dark. I floated aimlessly. I had nowhere to land. I was lost.

Arles, 1888

Here is a sketch: a large piece of land with clods of ploughed earth, for the most part a definite purple. A field of ripe wheat, in yellow ochre with a little carmine. The sky chrome yellow, almost as bright as the sun itself.

I am still enchanted by snatches of the past, have a hankering after the eternal…but when shall I ever get round to doing the starry sky, that picture which is always in my mind? Alas, alas, the most beautiful paintings are those of which you

dream.

     Tares of wheat ripple beneath a dazzling sky. The bruised earth rises up in waves. The hot sky rocks, queasy. I step into the field and fall, fall, keep falling.

     The morning sun crept up over the mountains and the sky was the color of unripe melon. I cried until the tears trickled into my ears. I held a brush in my hand, but I knew I could never paint the way I felt. Unfinished. Vague.

     How much loneliness the pale sun poured in through my window!

     I flung the brush out onto the grass.

     I wanted the cat.

     I want the cat. To sit in my lap where I can pet it and hear it purr and feel it beating with life. life. life.

     Denny waved me over from his side of the street. “Come see,” he yelled.

     He held a four-pack of flowers in each hand. He pushed them up near to my face and said, “Yours were so pretty I had to have some of my own.”

     The flowers were not zinnias, but marigolds. They looked, to me, like so many little mouths.

     He gave me a trowel, showed me where to dig.

     Blazing. Brilliant. Beauty slivering his veins. Splintering in his blood. Ribboning his flesh. Eating him. Consuming him. What does he do?

     What he really wanted was a piece of Gauguin. What he really wanted was a brother. What he really wanted was God in the garden. What he really wanted was a piece of flesh.

     Just this. A piece of flesh.

     This is how it happened: I wished and she came.

     I stood beneath a peach tree and held the cat in my arms. The cat blinked and opened its lips. I saw the tiny sawteeth. I held it, the cat, close against my chest and smelled the sun in its fur.

     There was a Swiss Army knife in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing. The jacket belonged to a lover I once had. The knife was small, meant for a keychain. The white cross on the red shank was nearly rubbed off. I took the knife in my fist, rubbed my thumb over the cross again and again. I thought about slipping the blade into the cat’s spine. What it would feel like. It horrified me, and I was ashamed for thinking it. I had to look at myself differently. It was like that: one stranger passing another in the park. And how they both turn around at the same time to get another look.

     I touched my face. My neck. I ran my hand over the cat’s vertebrae and the cat purred, a little engine.

     I put my hand back into my pocket and worked the blade of the knife out from the shank with my thumb, slowly so the cat wouldn’t startle and run off. I pet the cat with the edge of the knife. I stroked the knife across the cat’s fur and the cat purred and purred.

Arles, 1888

Is that all, or is there more besides? In a painter’s life death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it. But to look at the stars always makes me

dream.

    Indigo dark. I sit on a riverbank. I can smell the black water—the mud.

     Stars everywhere! Beneath me. Behind me. Floating the oily surface of the river. Swimming through the watery sky. Starlight shatters into ripples of lavender and green and tangerine pink.

     The grass on the bank whispers in the wind. I hear the low murmur of voices. I turn to look. Two lovers with their heads bent together gaze at the far away moon.

      Hello, I say. Hello hello.

     It takes a long time for them to hear me. They stop with their backs to me and I stand with my hands spread wide.

     The lovers turn in a long sweeping arc through the grass. The water behind me licks at the bank. A star plummets in the sky.

     The woman’s face is gashed in all directions. Her lips are blanched and cut through all the way to her chin. She bleeds from a wound across her neck. Parts of her nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears are missing. Her skin is white.

     The man is the dead boy with golden hair from the yellow meadow of buttercups. And my god he is beautiful.

     Denny said, “Have you seen Bugsy? I can’t find him anywhere.”

     At my feet, zinnias boiled pink and red and orange. “Who’s Bugsy?” I said.

     Denny looked as if he were about to cry. “My cat,” he said. “My baby.”

     Sun trickled through the leaves of the maple, lit on the blossoms, and it made me want to say something that meant something. I said, “Van Gogh spent the last few years in an asylum in southern France painting the scene from his window.”

     “What are you talking about?” he said.

     “Isn’t it amazing how much beauty there is in just one tiny square of the world?”

     “Bugsy is missing,” he said.

     “Wheatfields and fruit trees and every color of sky.” I swept my hand across my vision, blurring the fence, my neighbor, the blue, burbling clouds.

     “My cat,” he said. He drew his face close to mine, the smell of dirt and old sun in his hair. “Are you even listening to me?”

     “Denny. See.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “This is what I mean. Listen: while we are alive we cannot get to a star.”

     I watched the suck and pull behind his skin, his lips trembling as if bothered by breath. He shook my hand off and I held his gaze.

     “Shut up,” he sputtered, hollow-eyed, and I thought of Van Gogh on the other side of the canvas, the sun licking against his scalp, clawing at his flesh. “Where is my cat?” Denny said. He lifted his hand as if to touch me and I closed my eyes, waiting for his hand on my chest and all the way through me like a shatter of stars.

     The wind touched the back of my neck. I opened my eyes, and the sun slunk away.

     “Denny—”

     “I don’t understand,” he said. His hand dropped to his side, quivering as if already dead, and when I looked into his open mouth, I saw nothing but teeth.

     I shook my head and turned away. It was no less, no more, than I had expected.

*

     The bird is dead. Flattened out on the street in front of the gutter with its head rolled in on its chest like a tube of toothpaste. The gutter water runs with moss, a red battery, the dried-up petals of brown-colored blossoms.

Arles, 1888

O never think the dead are dead. So long as there are men alive, The dead will live, the dead will live.

     I painted a self-portrait on my stomach. The peach tree in my back yard busting out pink blossoms and the sun spilling white light across grass soaked blue with sky. I painted myself standing on the fence, my arms flung out from my sides. I painted leaves bursting through the slats. I painted garlands of clouds strung through the tree’s branches.

     I painted around my navel, filled it with cerulean blue and sap green. I painted the cat stretched out across my feet, its tail wrapping my calf. I painted its pink tongue with all the colors of the dawn.

     I lay still on the grass and took shallow breaths. I listened to the beat of my heart rumbling through the earth. Enough to wake the dead, I thought, unsure if it was a question or a joke. Unsure if the cat would claw to life and spring from the ground like a sprout from a seed…

     While the painting dried, I got to thinking about pigment seeping into the pores of my skin, glitters of paint tumbling through my veins.

     Tumbling—I can’t help but think it—as stars tumble through the darkest night.