To the Miscarried Child, Van Gogh’s Irises At Arles, by Mary Moore

Field With Irises Near Arles, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1888.

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To the Miscarried Child, Van Gogh’s Irises At Arles
 
The irises aren’t eyed, but tongued:
the three bearded sepals 
droop, pant, loll 
 
among the splayed jade-green blades,
while behind the jumbled
tilted flowers, 
 
buds a bird’s head,
its two white eye spots 
eying us: hybrid,
 
half plant, half animal,
like the foam-formed
almost human shapes we imagine
 
Turner’s turbulent seas cast up––
Poseidon, or something stymied,
unable quite to be,
 
like you, like me, 
mon soeur, ma semblable.
Aping the brush’s flame shape,
 
a few buds even fuse
art and artist.
The one white iris
 
tugs us into its cup,
outlier among the blues,
poor blind boast.
 
We think white looks
like absence not  
the plenitude it is, all colours,
 
married. And you, dear jilted ghost
of almost, veined iris-blue 
in the dark womb water, 
 
still porous, a skein,
all eyelets and mouths,
gone before you’d grown 
 
the human husk:
if you’d had the luck
to be born, 
 
would Vincent’s irises
have awed you too?
 
The terrors his brush disclosed, 
bad gods among the beauties.
 
Mary Moore

This poem first appeared in Amanda and the Man Soul, Emrys Foundation Prize Winner, 2017; and before that in Cider Press Review.

Mary Moore has five books, three in the past three years, and has work forthcoming in Poetry and Orison's 2019 anthology. She is retired from all but writing poetry.  She was a professor at Marshall U in Huntington WV, where she lives with a philosopher and a cat...or perhaps those are the same beings....