At the Psychiatrist’s Office, by Robin Michel

Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1889.

At the Psychiatrist’s Office

Through an open door, 
while seated in a waiting room chair , 
I glimpse a partially hidden view of Starry Night

magically, its thick eclipse exposes yellow sun & moon, 
inky blues now streaking across canvas once the colour 
of clinical white walls. 

It’s only a print. One of many Van Gogh 
reproductions stacked in bins in shopping malls 
across the country, thumb-tacked on dorm walls, 
or framed in the homes of aspiring corporate types 
with a fondness for the arts, doctors’ offices, or here, 
in the office of my teenage daughter’s psychiatrist.

Printed posters everywhere, easy to overlook or 
dismiss in the rush of ubiquitous overload, 
not unlike breathing—forgotten—until one forgets 
to breathe.     

Look again.

Thick broad brushstrokes deceptively simple 
until one notes the swirling complexity--
the  giant fingerprints of god, 
the bold genius of colour gone mad
 
This brief glimpse of a starry night escaping 
through an open door that will soon close to swallow 
my daughter and her secrets bruises my mother-heart 
with new tenderness. 

I think of my daughter’s sad lovely eyes peering through 
her camera’s view, recognizing beauty in a hard world,   
if only for a tiny starlit flicker, before the dark of night 
descends and we wait for a new constellation to appear. 

​Robin Michel

This poem first appeared in The Rappahhanock Review.

Robin Michel’s fiction and poetry has been published in Fresh Ink VI, The Midwest Poetry Review, The Noyo River Review, The New Guard, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Star 82 Review and elsewhere.