Vincent washes his brushes under water 

by Cate Mahoney 

I’m very eager to arrange 
Large yellow sunflowers 
Although there is no hurry. 
I’m going to paint my own bed. 
I no longer feel any hesitation about night. 
It is a place where one can commit a crime. 
It is a caricature of the mouth in bloom. 
Luck is everywhere and everywhere. 
It absorbs me and then the sunflowers. 
I am always full of another world. 
Poetry is more terrible than youth, they say— 
It gets on one’s nerves badly. 
But what compensation when there is a day without wind. 

Cate Mahoney is a junior, English major, and Creative Writing minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her poem was inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s correspondence with his younger brother, Theo, during the late 1800s. The poem is made up entirely of words found within these letters, although Cate took the liberty of forming the lines herself. Cate also has a cat named Theodore whom she loves dearly, but this is entirely beside the point.