I dream of painting, and then I paint my dream.
—Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother
while at Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

•••

He considered “The Starry Night” a failure—
too abstract, straying too far from nature,
painted as he looked out the iron-barred
windows of his rooms in the asylum.

Though he put himself there, though it did
not quell the madness, in a year some
150 paintings, more than 100 drawings
emerged.

It’s still there, the asylum, his upstairs room
and slender iron bed with head- and foot-
boards with more slender, vertical bars.
The ground-floor space where he set his easel,
where expressive, intense colors appeared.

Short, circular brushstrokes animate his
magnum opus—a summer night sky of cobalt
blue with flame-like cypress trees set against
zinc yellow and white whorls of stars.

If this is mania in oils, thickly applied,
we enter it willingly with him.

Never mind that nowadays his famous
dervish stars appear on a million coffee cups
and magnets, making his best-known painting
feel cliché.

But come closer. Focus on that
bright moon casting its sharp beam on
the little village he saw in his imagination,
the tapering points of the tall cypress
connecting earth and sky, life and death.

No failure, that—even as the artist’s mind
tormented him. Even as the whirling
overtook him, defeating the dream of sky
visualized by the one holding the brush,
a human being—like you, like me—

so much more than his suffering,
creating nothing less than a miracle.