THOUGHTS ON CÉZANNE

IN HIS OLD AGE


 

I could take in boarders

breakfast on crusts and water

drag sore knees and a jointed

German easel to the

rutted ridge near an

undistinguished hump

of brooding rock, painted

again and again

 

grow my beard wild as abandoned fields

if crazed suits and pronouncements

came with that fierce cool gaze

caressing with infinite tenderness

the golden skin

of a perfectly

ordinary

peach.




Version first published in The Federal Poet, Vol. LXIII No. 2 (Fall 2015); reprinted in The Spirit It Travels: An Anthology of Transcendent Poetry (Cosmographia, Summer 2019)