David Kirby
Dear Japanese Tourists, Van Gogh, Titian, and Goya
Auvers-sur-Oise, the Luxembourg Museum, the Mairie
of the Fifth Arrondissement
I always follow you: you know where you’re going, and if you don’t,
you’re never afraid to ask. I try to fit in. You figure, why bother?
And you’re always going where I am. I don’t look French,
but you really don’t look French, so if you’re here, it’s probably
not for the sushi! You came to see the room where poor Van Gogh
died. And his tomb, covered in ivy and framed by gangly hollyhocks.
And the church he painted, looking exactly as it did a hundred
years ago, only the sky is bluer in the painting, like a midnight sky
in the middle of the day. You and your friend take turns photographing
each other in front of the church and ask me to take a photo
of the two of you together. It’d be fun to have lunch with you,
but you don’t invite me. Why should you? Poets need Japanese
tourists, but Japanese tourists don’t need poets. Well, to take
a picture, yeah. Titian, you, too, tell us how to act: Pietro Bembo
says, “Endure!” Doge Andrea Gritti says, “Watch it,
you Turks—don’t mess with Venice!” Pietro Aretino says,
“Live it up, fellows.” And young Ranuccio Farnese says,
“Am I going to have to live my whole life in the public eye?”
Dan Ackroyd called you “Titty’un” on Saturday Night Live,
as though you were a magazine. You did like the gals, though:
Flora, La Bella Gatta, and Profane Love, known also as Vanity.
My favorite is Man with Gloves. I have gloves. And I’m a man,
though no longer young and never Italian. I wouldn’t say
I was vain, though I’d marry myself if I looked like the guy
in the painting. Your portrait of Philip II persuaded Mary
Tudor to marry him, though she died four years later. You
died during the plague and your mansion was vandalized by thieves.
But you were ninety years old and had painted your masterpieces
years earlier. And you no longer had to worry
about getting a job for your son Pomponio, an idiot. In Goya’s sketches,
the world wakes up. It’s an idiot giant! Go back to sleep, world.
Goya, you dream and produce monsters. An old donkey teaches
a young donkey the one thing he knows, braying. A donkey doctor
makes a sick man sicker. Others look at pictures of donkeys,
listen to monkeys play the guitar, sit for portraits by monkey
painters, try to ride people. A pretty naked woman straddles
a broomstick, only it’s piloted by a hag, her thin hair
and sagging bottom those of the pretty woman in just twenty
years. The title? “Nice Teacher!” The disasters of war: three men
in a tree, one in pieces, and “For this you were born”
(he’s looking at the dead bodies and vomiting).
Though younger, Théo Van Gogh died six months after his brother
and is buried next to him. The guide tells the Japanese tourists
he’d been in bad health anyway but died
of heartbreak. Théo and Vincent, still together after all these years.