by James Hoch
Standing in front of Van Gogh’s portrait, the winter one, bandaged, heavy green overcoat, blue hat black fur, each stroke deft, pained as the face he is showing, mangled but repairing as if lived through, something worth pleading on canvas– my son asks What happened to his head? He’s still a kid and doesn’t know the story, the unbearability of loving ones who leave. When I don’t answer he eats the quiet, the way when I turn down the radio’s litany of casualties, he hunkers like a monk burying his head in a bowl of Cheerios. But really, what is there to say— a photo, my brother patrolling a field of sunflowers in Afghanistan. It’ll be years before he understands the ear, that presence implicates the missing. It’ll be just after school lets out, driving to the grocery store, and he will tell me about another Van Gogh, a vase of sunflowers studied in art class. Simple task: To record how each differs, this head from that, this paint from that. We will be crossing the creek bridge and he will be mid-sentence and I will be thinking summer–roadsides lined with flowers in black buckets, and birds taking seed out of ones along the garden fence, wondering if he knows about Gauguin, the Yellow House in Arles. And just when I feel almost useful, he will ask: Did your brother have to kill anyone? What I don’t know becomes signature. What I can’t say becomes silence and silence scores the mind, and the mind, never letting go, takes the marks and makes a house of the cuttings, and the house says, dwell here. But all that’s outside the frame. We are here now, looking backward and forward at a painting of a man injured in love. And if I had the means, I’d ditch the day, turn all elsewheres noise, and hold truant the coma calm of a museum. And if I had the heart not to feel this forever’s not the one my son wants, I’d break it, strew it against the bric-a-brac and static. To stay still this long is a terrible thing to ask.
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Reprinted by permission of the poet. This piece originally appeared in American Poetry Review, and subsequently in Best American Poetry 2019 and his new poetry collection titled Last Pawn Shop in New Jersey: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2022).
James Hoch is also the author of Miscreants and A Parade of Hands. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and many other publications. Originally from New Jersey, he resides in the Hudson Valley and is professor of creative writing at Ramapo College and guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.