Starry Night
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ALAN SOLDOFSKY

 

Published in Grand Street #42 – Volume 11, Number 2 – Fall 1992
 
A great river swirls in the skies
above Arles. Vincent loved its whirlpools
and eddies, its blazing spheres and milky
streams . It is as if the day of judgment
were upon us, the curtain torn open,
every secret revealed. As if the beauty we give
ourselves up to had long before degraded him.
Impossible to stand close
without it scorching the skin.
How many of us truly want love
to tear us open, to burn its triumphant
thumbprint into our foreheads? The villagers
have put candles in their windows
for protection. Theirs is a dim heaven,
monumental and consumed. The hills sway,
an almost undetectable rhythm, a wave
pulsing in the earth, lapping
a moonlit field. The cypress
in the foreground smolders, a ruin of flame
beyond which the delirious wheels of Blake
and Ezekiel spin above the distant, gray
needle ofthe village church steeple.
   
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