PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Mal McKimmie

Mal McKimmie
Page 2

At the third stroke it will be

At the first stroke, I mistake my wife for

a hat, the dog for a cat, this word

(world) for that. At the second stroke, old

friends empty from the past, new from the future.

Did I have a wife? I have forgotten her:

lost my muse, half my mind, every poem.

A white pill of a nurse steers me to a home;

I stand around like a bathroom fixture.

But at the third stroke, all time that I have kept

falls into me and falls complete: I have wept

equally for sorrow as for joy:

my tears have filled, with the sea, the sky.

O my love if you were near you'd hear me shout:

See swimming up that rainbow, rainbow trout!

Gauguin’s soliloquy

And that is what the first and last cause of my aberration was.

Do you know those words of a Dutch poet:

‘I am attached to the Earth by more than earthly ties’?

Vincent van Gogh, 24 March 1889

The earth as it was when God was young

is witnessed in my master’s paintings.

As I listen now to the learnéd discourse

on each brushstroke and on scientific cause —

chrome yellow as evidence of jaundice,

distortion through the lens of mental illness,

that incident and epileptic voices —

I come to understand my master’s choices.

God spools his golden thread from fields near Arles,

stills the writhing pines, thumbs out those stars.

While the shadows of my master’s blade and gun

fall between God’s earth and the world of men,

deep down in the soil, still as an archetype

I wait; listening for his, and God’s, return.