La tristesse durera toujours

 

“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