Early Canvas

Wheatfield with a Lark—not yet a crow—and the sky oddly
serene, the swath of foreground grass untortured: stolid
horizontal bands. The brushstrokes here are fine, a dabbler’s
view while on vacation, ten days reading in a swept yard

and mild weather with a glass of beer at hand.
The lark is flying neither towards us nor away from us

in anger, nor bids us to follow. Turned upside-down, this is
an ocean or lake becalmed, and the dull green summer wheat:
fringe on a coastal merchant’s curtain. Sideways, it’s a flag
   with a single star,
or the lark, stuck like a beetle in blue resin, is Vincent’s
   eldest brother,
still-born and just crossed over into air, a failed attempt,
   work gone
too quickly to its rational conclusion. This is not what he
   wanted,
prone to imaginings, he who’d find grief in a simple bird
that does not feed or fall. Let it be the paint that burns;
better a sky than the mind churning. Turn this image to the wall.