“La tristesse durera toujours” — Vincent Van Gogh
Blown across a frozen lake, two dead birds reach a shore piled like cake
and drop,
light as hollowed tin, tumbled as ice-clad laundry,
blank as cataracts, bereft as dawn-shed snakeskins.
Something within the world creaks,
and crows
grumble along the margins
like long-abandoned women.
What is this tale? Is it happy? Grim?
Sad as a splintered cane propped in some bleary corner?
The sadness will last forever.
Will these harmonies suffice? Will
beauty walk alongside the righteous?
Art and love be adequate in this, our
harmless asides, these aimless, ageless
Instagram sins?
La tristesse durera toujours.
An engine cries a trail of smoke, shed
like the greyest tears,
left by the most
colourless
of impudent
faces.
Could you tell a tale of anything? Of
windbreaks and breakwaters, of
cheese plates and lovers’
furtive reunions,
all these faked aches? Hold my aspen hand,
trembling amid this tiny crisis, and
steel yourself for the
cataclysms
to come.
A bird dreams its shadow
on whitewashed walls.
Wakeful things decline to notice.
Oil spills leak and
the world cries
ever more echoes.
The sadness will last forever.
They worked on trains and chimney stacks,
climbed up walls, rode steaming tracks,
handed out tickets, soon foresaw
the luck of the Irish, the attack
of the eye-rash, the unblinking ruins
of war.
Spurn this like you spurn
most everything.
We’re in the centre of a room
bathed in gold, streamed like precious
sentiment, delivered by facsimiles
of the sun. What, oh what, I beg,
is our name?
La tristesse durera toujours.
***
Image: "Landscape with a Carriage and a Train" — Vincent Van Gogh