Suppose Gaugin had never seen Tahiti. Suppose the bêche-de-mer and
    sandalwood trade had not materialized
and the Polynesian gods held fast in the fruit of Nuku Hiva and the milk-
    and-honey waters of Eiao.
Suppose that Europe during whichever century of its rise toward science
    had not lost faith in the soul.
Suppose the need for conquest had turned inward, as a hunger after
    clarity, a siege of the hidden fortress.
Suppose Gaugin had come instead to America. Suppose he left New
    York and traveled west by train
to the silver fields around Carson City where the water-shaped, salt-and
    heart-colored rocks
appeased the painter’s sensibility and the ghost-veined filaments called
    his banker’s soul to roost.
Suppose he died there, in the collapse of his hand-tunneled mine shaft,
    buried beneath the rubble of desire.
Suppose we take Van Gogh as our model. Suppose reimagine him alone
    in the Dakotas,
subsisting on bulbs and tubers, sketching wildflowers and the sod huts of
    immigrants as he wanders,
and itinerant prairie mystic, like Johnny Appleseed. Suppose what
    consumes him is nothing as obvious as crows
or starlight, steeples, cypresses, pigment, absinthe, epilepsy, reapers or
    sowers or gleaners
but is, like color, as absolute and bodiless as the far horizon, the journey
    toward purity of vision.
Suppose the pattern of wind in the grass could signify a deeper
    restlessness or the cries of land-locked gulls bespoke the democratic
    nature of our solitude.
Supposed the troubled clouds themselves were harbingers. Suppose the
    veil could be lifted.    


    
                                                        Van Gogh - Wheatfields under Thunder Clouds