This is what he saw
between waves of madness,
in the moments of frenzied painting-
these writhing wheatfields ecstatically woven into the ground,
these tortured trees screaming from his slipping mind,
piercing the framed silence of the landscape,
the reaper in a smeared white smock
hopelessly tying the mad shocks beneath a burning sun
and the field running on forever
and the distant town exhaling a sliver of smoke
above a churning sea, splashing squirts of indigo all over the shore
and even those clouds, in the distance,
stippled in as an afterthought,
wafting terrible and calm on the horizon.

I want to touch those thick swabs of paint
to feel what he felt
and run my fingers over his madness
spilled on the canvas.
I want to lick the blue-green sky
and taste what he tasted,
on his lips and on his tongue,
killing himself,
as I view his world in front of me, trapped in oil.

Zachariah McNaughton