After a note by Jules Laforgue
The melancholy of Van Goyen’s pale autumn marines.
Sad, eternal wind – life in monotone –
boats loaded to tipping point, drowned banks
where melancholic cattle, submerged to the knee, nose for grass –
windmill struts emaciated against the hills –
the little village of thatched cottages on stilts
where we sleep outside to the eternal lapping of dirty flotsam
and a thread of chimney smoke.
Fish stew boils muddily, rascals whine.
Wide skies where heavy rainclouds pass eternally overhead –
white storks flapping to other countries.
But how to grasp the heartbreaking melancholy
of Van Goyen’s stained, sad marines?
And the heavy boats, coarse and pot-bellied –
with mechanical fishermen in the daily occupation of rough lives?
It’s their lives, sad and monotone in the wind,
the drenched skies, those in the distance drowned in fog –
and then they die, having known nothing at all –
that’s the melancholy of Van Goyen’s stained, sad marines.
How deeply he must have felt this melancholy
to so naturally describe these horizons, these monotone groups of fishermen –
the whole of this life,
wrapped in gusts of wind and horizons striped with rain showers.
