At Its Best, a Painting
Who Made the Frame
One Hundred Bright Fellows
Marie
The Letter
Mr. Ginoux
Mrs. Roulin
Van Gogh Paints Sunflowers
Yellow Christ
Irises
Almond Blossoms
The Red Vineyard
Is a window, where you might gaze into the painter’s heart, at the same moment you look into the rooms of your own. A dance, sure, or a song, or a book, but the painting is the place that is shaped like a window. Entering a vacation home, you consider the view. Vision, yours and the artist’s, overlap. Two sparrows at the same backyard feeder. And somewhere nearby, the hawk. Because whether you look at a painting or hold the brushes and dab the paint, a painting is a window that looks to a kind of danger. As you pick at the millet, oh tender sparrow you might also be consumed.
and from what sort of wood? Are you the sort of person who would cut down the tree? Who measures and cuts and sands, who pulls out the varnish or the can of gilded paint? Paintings in attics, imagine them stacked in the corner where the roof’s been leaking; wasps have been busy making their nests. A generation of mice, born in the corner where your paintings were stacked. The starry night of mice, and a series of sunflowers, painted for the wasps and the small blooms of mildew, its own kind of garden. What is a genius, and how many works are stacked willy-nilly on the junkheap of time?
So you read the placards on the walls, you read about the paintings, note the year of their creation, and you gather up the story to yourself: a tormented artist who hoped for a savior, who hoped for a friend, Van Gogh in the Yellow House, with his eyes turned to fire, with his eyes turned to flowers. In one version of the universe, Van Gogh still waits for someone to join him. There in that village let’s build a new movement; let’s place brushes in the hands of one hundred bright fellows; why not seek a teacher to fill your eyes with light?
I ordered soft-boiled eggs in the night café, but Marie said that a fox had devoured all the chickens. So I asked for a plate of sausages, but she said the grocer had only delivered hard cheese. “Fine,” I said, “the cheese.” And she asked if I aspired to the career of chief mouse.
“King mouse,” she said. “Lord of stinking cheeses.”
“Marie,” I sighed. “Scamp,” she called me. “Pollywog, scoundrel.”
“Bread,” she yells, half in the direction of the kitchen. “Toasted bread for this bounder, and a box on the ears if he dares ask for butter.”
I just realized that I haven’t written to tell you told you that my friend Paul is living with me and we are very happy. He encourages me to dwell in my imagination. This is hard for me, but as you know my goal is to become a more poetic character. I eat more apples. I drink only wine. Every afternoon I name our loaf of new bread. “Gert,” I might call it, or “Pascal.” I’m sure to slice and eat half of this new friend by morning.
That’s what I called him. Since I never actually spoke to him, I never learned his real name. Restrained, that’s what you might want to call our relationship. Really, he was just a man I saw most mornings on the train--I liked the way he pomaded his hair. And I liked that his eyes could be the exact color of the morning, that pale of a sky. I’d say I found him perfect, but I thrill to recall the day his suitcoat was stained with coffee. Oh Mr. Ginoux, the days pass, and you no longer board at our station. I imagine that you died tragically: arson, a car wreck, poisoning, a duel. I like to imagine that dozens of us mourn, shades in an otherwise deserted schoolyard, a rusty slide, the swing creaking on a rusty chain, puddles in the furrows made of tears. But more likely: you’ve moved: a better neighborhood. A new address.
During that entire tense month of December I posed for them. I knew nothing, I did not know how to stand. I didn’t know how to remain still for so many hours. The painters smelled of drink and sweat, and their gaze made me uneasy. My husband never stared at me for so long, not even on our wedding night. That’s how it felt to have Van Gogh paint my portrait, like a bride, disrobing for her husband when the wedding feast is done. Instead of approaching you with his rough hungers, with the probing fingers of a man, he stares at you. Like he’d just invented the entire night sky.
He looks at me as I paint little suns, he paints my portrait as I paint the suns, I think he mocks my need to capture the sun, with his eyes sparking fire, and the cut flowers burning. I fancy the flowers are still alive and they want to be the sun, while the sun itself wishes it could dwell in a vase—oh hello brother flowers! The sun must be so lonesome, the only fire in the village. He watches me from his blue slap of sky as I mix the brightest yellow. He watches me, he watches my hands, jealous that I‘ve learned to weave with sunlight, jealous that with these, my turpentine-cracked hands, I stroke belly-round furnace of heaven.
When next he arrived, Christ came as a sunflower. In the early autumn he spoke to other sunflowers and gathered the starlings into crowds. Take and eat, he said to the birds. Because his voice was the voice of a tall yellow flower, all you and I would hear was the wind.
Oh banners, oh theatres, oh paper cups torn by the rain, time is your enemy, you are gone too soon, your petals scattered. Time is the master. Must the world be a graveyard for indigo flowers?
If you will be my snowfall, I will remain the evening’s teal sky; if you clothe yourself in scent, like God’s younger sister, I will make myself a prayer mat; each tree in this orchard is one solemn declaration: God is a snowstorm who so loved the world.
A handful of coins. That’s all I received, after I gave them the sun and the harvest and the light along the river. With a horse-drawn cart suggested in the distance, because I want to give each viewer a humble means of travel.
Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon, is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in 2 Rivers View, Action/Spectacle, I-70 Review, The San Pedro River Review, The Madrid Review, and West Trade Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.
