Drawn out into the countryside

By the bellows of his soul

Longing for the tenement interaction

That solemnly brought joy into his heart

He began to move away from watercolors

From thinly painted recreations

Of realistic buildings

Of drawn lines of architecture

Of any sort of representation of reality

To draw out the demons inside

And replicate them on the canvas

With thickly gouged palettes of paint

Into the peasant faces

That he unearthed

Beneath the hovels

Inside the mine shafts

Into saltpeter factories

Of the peat moss plateaus

North of Antwerp

East of The Hague

In the late nineteenth century

 

Before the verbiage of Nietzsche

Caused the inner catastrophe

Of the conscious

Of the interactions with the grounded vessel

That surrounded the internal edifice

Of every light footed European

That grew disconsolate with the dawn

Before the meanderings of Freud

Long before the exposition of Einstein

He found a soft place

In his decrepit soul

For the peasants of the Frisian lowlands

 

He would begin to paint them each

With momentary methodological inspiration

Drawing out the chiaroscuro

From the edges of the darkened room

Where the gnarled-knuckled peasants

Sat around the table

Eating potatoes

 

He had been nebulous

In his quest

For inert moments of solace

Within the embrace of any

Untethered woman

That he had stumbled across

As he made his way

Ploddingly

Through the mud-crusted

Footsteps

Of his late adolescence

Into the granular maturations

Of epically infirm

Adulthood

 

There was a soft subtle moment

When he recognized

That he was brought forth

Reared

From the disentrenched unity

Of Dutch foot soldiers

Trapped inside the epistle

Of Protestant reform

 

He would angle his existence

Towards combative isolation

Away from the sardonic gaze

Of the minister’s son

Who had failed at everything

But the caustic epiphany

Of a disconsolate soul

Who would have been left

Stranded

On the rocky shoreline

Even with the imprint of motherly love