(Arles, 1888)
Long stone slabs, a flight of steps
leading from a roughly cobbled street.
Then a narrower stairway flanked
by thick concrete walls, twenty-six
risers to a modern steel bridge,
gray stringers trussed above
a swirl of white space. Figures,
van Gogh’s usual stocky blobs,
muddle up and down and along
the bridge, their errands obscure,
undelineated. Only
a red protective wrapping
about a sprig of foreground sapling
violates the blue-green-gray
of the wholly architectural
composition. To live in so
rigid a scene would humble
the grossest of Christians. The cracked
eggshell of sky allows no god
to peer at the people hunching
along their determined routes.
Yet van Gogh drew this freehand,
and in the reckless execution
he allowed his composition
to escape him, slurring and flexing
and finally escaping into
the boughs of a tree barely glimpsed
beyond the arch on the right,
the only natural perspective.