Street in Saintes-Marie de la Mer, by Herman Sutter

Street in Saintes-Marie de la Mer, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1888

Street in Saintes-Marie de la Mer 

I.
What cannot be captured spilling,
spreads; it will not be denied; 

it becomes alive beneath the artist’s eye.
Simple, how a spray of colour caught 

in thickets of pigment and oil restrained 
upon a canvas recalls the hand that held 

the brush, recalls the eye that gazed at this,
not house or sun or shrub but this canvas

become a record of where a hand smeared
a curl of paint to become a trail of smoke.


II. 
In this painting there are no shadows
only fields of colour pressed by the artist

upon a memory: houses descending into 
the sun yellow sky descending beyond 

the descending horizon. A burst
of green becomes flowering shrubs; 

blue and red blossoms flaring from 
the stiffening palette that turns 

a thatched roof into tiers of taffeta swirling,
as if all he saw was colour --so alive.

Herman Sutter

Herman Sutter is the author of The World Before Grace (Wings Press). His poetry and stories have appeared in: Touchstone, i.e., The English Review, Saint Anthony Messenger, The Houston Poetry Fest, and the anthology, By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019).   His narrative poem, "Constance" received the Innisfree prize for Poetry, and his poem for voices The World Before Grace was honored by the Texas Playwrights Festival.
​