First Visit <br /> <br />Sunflowers among camomile and borage, <br />spread and patterned on a Van Gogh frame, <br />a field of folk art, farmer's art, so strange <br />stared at by back-packers, making front page news, <br />paparazzi and art students forming queues <br />by a path down the margin of fearful green, <br />shadow-blue, russets of hedgerows. <br />Sunbursts of foliage threaten to unhinge <br />the ragged acreage of apparent posy, foreign <br />geraniums, an anthology, porringer of fat fox-grass, <br />wheats, wild oat, purplish burdock, all your range <br />of old sandstones, colours you could scrounge <br />from arboreta, tigerlilies or tangerines - <br />a riotous fieldful of rhymes for orange. <br /> <br />Second Visit <br /> <br />How to translate this tortuous artist, crazed <br />by his brilliant eye, from the hot fulness of France, <br />his frilled language the colours of late romance, <br />his pointillism like the seeds of words <br />rushed into growth-swirls; how to make <br />his pictures into lowlands' give-and-take <br />of flat and formless pasturage? This mad try <br />by a boy down the dune-lands, echoes the essays <br />of the invincible brush that wasn't, being French, Victorian. <br />It's not the nothing that ever happens, while I wonder <br />what turns this Jimmy into a Florian: <br />in the weird edges of creativity where I wander <br />everything never happens at once. <br />Which siècle is this the fin de?<br /><br />Sally Evans<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/van-gogh-s-sunflowers-in-a-lothian-field/
