everything.

I usually read for a bit in bed before I turn out the light. That's what I was doing a few minutes ago when I found this in an old collection of poetry (I keep folders stuffed with a mélange of photocopies; this was one).

I have no idea how I got it, but loved it enough to run back downstairs to share with you. Enjoy.

A favorite poet, Mary Oliver, writes about a favorite painter, Vincent van Gogh.
He said (which I often think of): "If one intensifies all the colors, one regains peace and harmony."

Mary says:

No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds,
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness --
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.