Featured Poem

To Step Inside His Mind

“Immersive Van Gogh” is a 16,000 square foot installation on Pier 36, NYC.
A 40-minute loop of 400 animated Van Gogh images plays in three adjoining spaces–
a moving mashup reflected on broad walls, floors, and dazzling mirror sculptures.
Light bounces everywhere, including from visitors’ bodies and faces

Dark entry corridor, black shiny floors,
I’m handed a pillow, covered with a Van Gogh image,
I kneel in the first gallery.
A winged insect flies in, quivering alone on the tall wall,
followed by innumerable swarms fluttering high and low,
glittering on the mirror sculptures, buzzing on the black floor.
Van Gogh appears on top of them with candles in his hat and swats;
a shock of sunflowers takes over.
All surfaces disappear into sheer colour:
yellows, golds, tournesols, tournesols—the pure joy of sunflowers
growing and shrinking, assembling and disassembling.
Children run to catch the huge blooms, stamp them on the floor.
Gone!
And the music changes: orchestral plant-climbing music
switches to Edith Piaf, her plaintiff vocals–

“Rien de rien, rien de rien. Non, je regrette rien.”
Am I dizzy?
Now we’re in sugar cane fields, triplets of rising harp notes,
Japanese figures on bridges, kimonos.
Nodding buds, bursting poppies. Two yellow butterflies
alight on fields of red against a swath of pale blue sky.
Van Gogh mutters, there is no blue without red and yellow,
I move to the second gallery.
The same loop of images plays again, yet I enter
at a moment of nuns singing dirges,
and in the third gallery, different moment in the loop,
peasants chat in patois.
Van Gogh’s self-portraits drop down the walls
at intervals, sometimes upside down,
his knowing eyes, his changing beard transforming everywhere.
A train chugs through the village,
people in the gallery echo clusters of folk in nearby wheat fields.
Visitors take photos, selfies, we’re all part of the scene.
Same scale, standing on the floor or toiling in the fields,
A curtain of black spinning Rorschach blotches pull all colour
to the floor. Now, moments of madness, light patches of lucidity.
Blue clouds go crimson, Vincent howls behind barred windows
while he paints version after version of Nuit Etoilée,
His final commentary, ultimate vision—a starry night roils
with melting aerolites, comets adrift.
His purple is heaven and hell.
Velvet violet-blue flowers snake
the walls, the floors, the mirrors—tongues languishing–
I drown in Irises.

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