With so many things to admire
it’s easy to overlook the perseverance—
getting up each morning to paint again,
to drink another cup of bitter coffee
and go back to work. This was long before
any of the work—yellow sun clusters
spackled to the blank faces of white canvas—
auctioned for millions of euros.
These days, he’s off somewhere
shaking his head in befuddlement.
What he remembers is slightly less wonderful—
so much failure to overcome:
not lucky in love, not lucky with friends,
not lucky selling the damn paintings.
Still, he kept finding purple irises
rioting alongside the cracked walls of an asylum,
a haloed sower tossing sunflower seeds at barren soil,
the white explosions of peach blossoms
blooming hysterically in some farmer’s orchard.
When the world finally bowed down to his genius,
it had to be in pieces, painting
by painting, one or two per museum.
The other alternative,
an entire room of rolling French landscapes
and flaming gardens in midsummer heat,
would likely blind the human eye
in a tsunami of color, igniting an internal
blaze, as it does daily in Amsterdam.