"cezanne" poems
A small skiff drifted in the harbor
guided by the eazy oars of a fisherman
standing in the hull to better view
the shimmering reflection
of the orange circle hovering overhead-
dancing with the gentle waves
in the morning mist.
Monet had to name it something
so he called it what it was:
"Impression, soleil levant."
A critic, wanting poison for his pen,
seized Monet's title to squeeze
a lethal dose into the radical veins
of the artist and his fellows of the gallery
(Renoir, Pissarro, Cezanne).
With scathing indignation
he dubbed the lot of them,
"Mere Impressionists."
The label endures (minus one word)
but how many recall or care to know
the righteous critic's name?
November, 2011
Jul 7, 2015
Jul 7, 2015 at 4:40 AM UTC
*The day is coming when
a single carrot
freshly observed
will set off a revolution.
-- Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)*
Mar 24, 2014
Mar 24, 2014 at 11:46 AM UTC
Aye, Montecelli, that's the name.
You may have heard of him perhaps.
Yet though he never savoured fame,
Of those impressionistic chaps,
Monet and Manet and Renoir
He was the avatar.
He festered in a Marseilles slum,
A starving genius, god-inspired.
You'd take him for a lousy ***
Tho' poetry of paint he lyred,
In dreamy pastels each a gem: . . .
How people laughed at them!
He peddled paint from bar to bar;
From sordid rags a jewel shone,
A glow of joy and colour far
From filth of fortune woe-begone.
'Just twenty francs,' he shyly said,
'To take me drunk to bed.'
Of Van Gogh and Cezanne a peer;
In dreams of ecstasy enskied,
A genius and a pioneer,
Poor, paralysed and mad he died:
Yet by all who hold Beauty dear
May he be glorified!
2.6k
Greens and gold of lattice work cascading down the tree,
This epiphyte, so infinitely, delicately free.
A lattice work of green finesse, a miniature Cezanne
With exquisiteness of spiky bloom embellishing it’s charm.
Cascading down the grizzled trunk of gnarled and twisted hand
The hosting ancient Kamahi looms loftily, so grand.
Looms aloft with leafy bough so softened by the show
Of ruffled, pinkish bottle brush amassing high and low.
Hordes of buzzing, bumble bees so clumsy in their way,
Tumbling from flower to flower collecting nectar’s day.
With afternoon the waning sun lies hot on sultry air
And little girls in pretty frocks skip by with not a care.
Summer grasses long and dry stand statuesque and straight
With sweet laburnum’s perfumed heads a nodding by the gate.
Young heifers graze in clover in the dell down by the brook
And the fantail dances daintily seeking insects in the nook
There’s a special, quiet majesty pervading here, so fair
With the thistledown afloat, so still with golden motes in air.
Fills my soul with gentle feeling and a rolling tear, unplanned,
For this blend of quiet ambivalence through my beauteous rural land.
Marshalg
“Foxglove” Taranaki.
NEW ZEALAND.
19 January 2014
Jan 21, 2014
Jan 21, 2014 at 2:29 PM UTC
Standing on the intersection of
a Monet, a van Gogh, and a Picasso
Nice piece of real estate!
Water lilies ~ Charrette de boeuf ~ Tete d'homme
Let's start with the lilies:
I'm impressionable and I gaze lovingly into the pool
I see my reflection slowly unfurl in the shimmer of the pink petals
As in a dream ... I float on
The watchmaker sends an instruction: rotate clockwise
Now an ox cart:
I seem to be walking in Poe's imagination
Crows flitting about as the ox champions
His burden on a drafty day
Another instruction from the watchmaker: continue clockwise
And now Tete d'homme ~ cubism:
My world deconstructs
Line by line, shapes and forms
Fracture into the subterranean unconsciousness of my mind
Leading to another instruction: close your eyes
Shift
Your
Perspective
Watchmaker says: open your eyes
Uncentre
Misalign
Unhitch
Watchmaker says: ens causa sui: 'a being that causes itself'
Now I've got Dali giving me niggling doubts about the nature of time
Sartre with a side of Darwin and I'm being and nothingness
Ground yourself Mullin!
Open your eyes ... this is reality
There's Rodin in a battle of good versus evil
Munch and no screams! This is good
Gaugin sharing his garden view
I'm in my happy place again ...
That's better
And here's Cezanne, Degas, Renoir, and Pissarro
Bringing me back into a recognizable reality
My eyes and my mind are in alignment here
But I can feel that watchmaker winding me back up
My iris constricts and my pineal widen
Third eye ain't blind
Hope someone is around to catch me
No worries, I'm sailing with Renoir and
I've found A Muse (Constantin Brancusi)
Ain't life a musing?
Nov 12, 2014
Nov 12, 2014 at 10:34 AM UTC
I have in me a bit of Tuscan sun
The wildness of mistral
The calmness of a Cezanne village
I often walk around the countryside of Pissaro
And see the colors, still abundant, undefeated
I stroll around the lilies and the harbor of France where Manet painted being thrown out of his house, not able to pay the rent
I dance with the beautiful girls in high society Parisian parties of whom from Zola to Maugham spoke about
I learn art in silence, in the bright orange color of the day drawing the French young girl
Whose face is like Madonna
Her innocence, her laughter, her flawless body
Excite me, breaks me, creates me
I walk with clean head and red wine in the streets of Montmartre
Searching the gone and dusted studio of Renoir, Picasso, Monet
I stand exactly there where there is nothing old except the moon
And the Sacre Couer
In the morning I take the first train to Auvers Sur Oise
And walk into the cemetery
Where lie in the gorgeous French sun
Vincent and Theo Van Gogh
I utter to them, "Can dream ever be false?"
It is when I heard the footsteps
I turned
The girl in the yellow dress stands at the gate of the cemetery
Whom I draw every day but never captured her beauty
The French girl
We both stand there as it is
As if
framed
paused
Frozen
We, the Impressionists!
Aug 8, 2020
Aug 8, 2020 at 8:45 AM UTC
my loves, the many accumulated mn-
eumonic responses play'd on future
women. ideas based on the poiv-
rottes of idealized affectation past.
cesspools emptied by the horse-tanks
with stelth in the night, but the-
re couldn't be much stealth for a target
reeking of **** and convalescence.
sadness and that odor would
hang heavy in the first cold rains
of winter. transplanting thoughts,
always transplanted emotions of
subjugation. she was waiting for
someone, this now past but once
future poivrotte. feet to be
knock'd from under, body to find
lulling embrace. mind the levitat-
ing affect. mind, the missing
portion of our feint'd love.
and
- I was always empty and
both sad and happy
with a third-class train ride, at
mon poivrottes' expense of mentality.
we could used to lay together talk-
king in adult tones through our
child mouths. remembering to poc-
ket fruit to retain our breakfast
from freezing. speaking no truer
words than those utter'd while
embraced. words from the mou-
ths of us children. truer words
never could be counterfeit, never
could be spoken without loss of
conscience. Cezanne-dreams of color,
Impressionist subconscious,
j'adore mon poivrottes. feasting of mo-
vement and staining all around with
the strong cafe au lait. follow'd aper-
itif, following digestifs, following back
to lie. to flow words from our child mo-
uths, we would walk paths through the
woods in the Autumn twilight. the trees
were sculptures having their leaves
stripped bare. walking alongside, we walk'd
ourselves down the same separate path.
Feb 17, 2013
Feb 17, 2013 at 4:54 PM UTC
every breath tastes
rancid on my tongue;
fun fact, if all you eat is
raspberry yogurt and
hypersaturated strawberries,
your ***** looks like
Jackson ******* plus
Picasso's Rose Period.
has anyone ever told you
that drunk texting you is like
standing in front of a Caravaggio;
it's dusky and dark and sensuous and I
******* adore getting lost in
translation. Cezanne draws solely in
molecular geometry, tetrahedral,
trigonal pyramidal, octahedrons
scrawled across the canvas and doused
in living color. Thursday night already
seems so intangible,
a bad dream that didn't dice up my liver
like a ******* sous chef. Thursdays
have come and gone, the weekends
ever-beckoning, and the scent of Smirnoff
stays in my sinuses.
Nov 16, 2014
Nov 16, 2014 at 10:46 AM UTC
I started dreaming in black and white.
you never seemed to
belong in this
technicolour drenched era,
an age of blood
carnations and sapphire Bomb Pops.
***** yellow cardboard boxes in
fluorescent refrigerated cases:
there are goosebumps on my arms and you
hated grocery shopping; I made the lists
and I made the buys; you made the
money, you made love.
we bought a Cezanne print for the
great room; it hangs above the frozen
hearth, grey sunlight filtered through
the cellulose blinds. there is a too tall
glass of scotch on the coffee table beside
a too empty scotch bottle and a too full
bottle of benzodiapenes: I haven't been
self-preservative, and you've been
self-prescribing.
we weren't cut out for this era,
an age of cum-coated lips and
onyx Benzes; we would've been better
in black and white, where our
color-saturated demons couldn't come, where our gem-studded cancers couldn't
eat us alive.
Sep 16, 2014
Sep 16, 2014 at 6:53 PM UTC
The college kids still pump out poems;
my heroes haven't published a book in years.
The academics are moving to visual arts
kerning letters on the page, adding artist statements.
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
Passion fades with age, I suppose. A symptom of
the cult of happiness.
And I love to read poems
from twenty-somethings who just want to get ******
I picture my red pen exciting them as I destroy
their fine-tuned metaphors, all muddled with conflicting allusion,
as if juxtaposition alone adds meaning.
In school, it was all Cezanne and hydrogen jukebox birdsongs,
and equally interesting but useless adjective strings.
The academics are doing the same, but with form.
It bores us, don't they know?
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
**** these kids for having such easy means to publication.
I read their journals, their magazines, their "editions"
online, vivid, vomiting color and opinion.
I long for publishing classified ads and
scribbled chalk portraits of the women I loved
and the twenty-somethings who just wanted to get ******
and reflections of how I never mastered either craft.
I long to rub the ink off newsprint in my fingers,
smudge the words on the page and ***** my hands,
watch the chalk run into the red brick
during ten-minute monsoons, smell the library's adobe,
light a cigarette and remember that the stacks are filled
with ages of greater work than these ******* kids...
and these ******* academics.
Greater than me.
Jul 14, 2015
Jul 14, 2015 at 5:04 AM UTC
Eating breakfast on a strange star
way up in the sky
Baconian, egg-less and toasty creatures
passing by
Waving at me
four arms four hands
avoiding crumbs
while dancing to joyful one-man bands
Painting Cezanne's masterpieces
with van Gogh like skill
painting purple geese
and showing off until
I woke up hot
looking like hell
cursed my way down to my mademoiselle
Apologised to her in rapid succesion
got on my seat and called me a connection, waitress;
told her my **** breakfast was tasteless
Looked up at her hands and noticed some things
she was wearing some great tiny shiny gold rings
that wasn't that much strange but i noticed something else
She had twenty fingers
and four ******* hands
'crazy', i thought, all by myself
Woke up again
but in rapid succesion
and glad to find my girlfriend
waiting in vain
Apr 24, 2016
Apr 24, 2016 at 4:25 PM UTC
aborted babies in jars.
who might they have become?
perhaps another paul cezanne.
maybe a worker at burger king,
or perhaps the next muhammad ali
heavy weight champion of the world.
could be an axe ******
or worse
a politician or a lawyer.
maybe the next ernest hemingway.
the bitter taste of burnt dreams
lost in a prison of expectation.
screams of the heart.
Sep 26, 2017
Sep 26, 2017 at 2:13 PM UTC
.
Cezanne
CezanneCe
CezanneCez
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezanne
Cezann Ceza nne Cezanne
Cezanne Ceza nne Cezanne
Cezanne. Cezanne
Oct 8, 2014
Oct 8, 2014 at 4:25 PM UTC
I like to believe
that nobody understands me
and I'm one of a kind
lost to obscurity
but hinting of mysterious
significance
And I feel sorry for
my uncle's three-legged dog
and the malignancy
of fear in rural America
and the failed successes
of the Bolsheviks
I wonder about the air
in Saõ Paolo in January
and the muskuloskelatal
infirmities that creep in
and make the aged
into churlish curmudgeons
There is no way I could
hunt truffles or find a fresh
Morel in the woods when
I didn't even realize until
my grandmother died that
we own a creek
Uttering vespers in moonlight
yields some sanguine lucidity
like contemplating the nuanced
differences between polenta
and cornmeal mush
It's like I'll never write a poem
in time or finish a marathon
or kiss a stranger deeply
through the crisp ventillation
of nevermore.
We might daydream the bombastic
colors of Cezanne but all
we'll ever be is some nondescript
platinum ischemic flash,
a slimy buffet consisting in
all-is-lost
An apocryphal journey
to the center of the city
faces our insubordination to plastic
with the harshness of a dictionary
in the face of the illiterate
But in the end, apoplectically
forgotten, I come to the
unintelligent conclusion,
mathematically speaking,
that there is nothing singular
nor more available
than the finite banality
of my empty, insufficiently
obscurantist words which
flow and choke and all can know
and see clearly through
though I insist that none
of this pretence is born
of any maleveloence, and I chide
"How very meta of me indeed"
to have thought of another witty
and most cleverest retort
the day after the insult
was first delivered
But I used my last gift card
to purchase this still life
to pierce the hollow
cerulean satisfaction
otherwise known as tears
Barring diastolic ******
I'll stick around to see
how this all turns out
and hope that one day I can stop
being so completely understood
And then I can hide in the lonely
and find refuge in the cave
as a single meaningless scrawl
buried in the last pages
at the end of the world.
May 1, 2015
May 1, 2015 at 12:36 AM UTC
A line cook at Denny’s (must have own pans)
Is an artist, accomplished in assemblage
Compositions of eggs (rather like Cezanne’s)
Toast, bacon, waffles for his decoupage
His gesso is the window layered in steam
Built of reflections and condensation
Hinting at the flowing Interstate stream
Beyond the No Smoking pumping station
The line cook has indeed his pans and plans -
Art, as the muse of cookery commands
Mar 27, 2019
Mar 27, 2019 at 4:06 PM UTC
They sit in the humblest of frames,
Faux wood-grained plastic grotesqueries
Purchased long ago from some doomed Grants or Bradlees,
Though one or two enjoy something nicer,
Left behind by some long-timer taking a buyout
Or a sympathetic youngster denied tenure
(She has, for the better part of three decades,
Cleaned up the detritus of middle-school children,
A bit stooped from the work,
Not to mention the burden
Of any number of she’s just or she’s only
Tossed like so much bric-a-brac in her direction.)
The approximations of old masters equally eclectic in origin:
One or two gallery-quality reproductions
Blithely abandoned by some haughty faculty matron
Mentoring children through noblesse oblige,
The odd promotional piece from a scholastic publisher,
Mostly things she has cut from magazines or discarded texts.
She studiously avoids pieces tending to the dark or muted,
No Stuart portraiture or pensive Vermeers;
She has a strong predilection for bold, boisterous Gaugins,
Mad cubist Picassos, lush Cezanne still-lifes,
Even the odd blocky *******
If you pressed her to explain her fetish
For the brightest of the great masters,
She would likely be at a loss to explain,
Having no academic bent for such things
(Though she has been known to curse the shortcomings
Of lithographers and pressmen under her breath)
And, as she freely admits, I’m not much good with words.
There would be the uncharitable suggestion
That their purpose is to mask cracks and pockmarks in her walls
(She has, to be sure, lived in a long series of such places)
But she has never, consciously or otherwise,
Used them for such pedestrian and utilitarian purposes;
They are, to her anyway, beautiful, and that is all they need be.
Dec 23, 2016
Dec 23, 2016 at 11:17 AM UTC
Still Life With Apples
Cezanne would ignore the grain
omit the quarter moon flute
burned quarter inch deep
pay scant attention
to your recollection
of the barn in Armada
rinsed to a rumor of red
listen politely as you paint
a picture of the man who ran
the orphanage for bedsteads
wardrobes and sideboards
steal glances at his watch
while you play both parts
retelling the horse trade
eyebrows frantic to escape
gravity
your own straining
to lift off and boomerang
around the circumference of the table
lighting on the ordinal
points of countless dinners
apples
in the mind’s eye of the artist
flocking like birds
defying gravity
on the dizzy oval of oak.
Oct 29, 2016
Oct 29, 2016 at 8:21 AM UTC
~an artwork beneath our feet, yet invisible to
our eyes, constantly changing ,interlocking
interlinking~
this poem has asked for composition
everytime, I walk upon and past the sculputure
beneath my feet on the Esplanade by The River
(Diatom Lace on the East River - Stacy Levy
www.stacylevy.com › projects › diatom-lace-on-the-east-river) (1)
but as I daily hurry past (for years) and over this pattern form lifted from the
river's flowing,
a daily delaying,
for the words good enough to honor it, the invisible floating floral tentacles,
attaching each water molecule to the next,
do not arise of sufficient quality of wordsmithy,
the Whitman words do not float up from the waters rushing past,
and come to rest in my multi-tasking poetry conceptuals
many months, even years,
have gone by and after every water walk,
the sculpture stabs me guilty,
of procastination,
and an unwillingness to tackle it,
like the other tough stuff that haunts me
so this morning, when I drown in the file laughingly called
100 & One Drafts
a J'accuse (1) finger stabs my eyes and repeats the caveat of the sage
Hillel the Elder: (1)
If not now, when?
and even as I sit and compose,
the words refuse to surrender unto me
for easy transcription
and the chest tight with guilt, from all the
promises I've made and remain
unkempt & unkept,
that stunt and stun my spirit,
with inconsolable sadness
So
I distract myself,
check the sleeping woman<
take my morning meds,<
reheat my "The Gamblers Mug" (Cezanne)(1) of morning coffee,<
and alas, at last, once more surrender to my worst,
and issue an invitation to >you<
come visit me, come walk with me,
perhaps together, a greater good will emerge,
and we will feed each others tongues
with syllables and sounds,
that will trigger,
go figure!
a suitable poem
worthy of a great art work,
the lace of diatoms
in the water,
that our eyes cannot see,
but our hearts
can feel
and with better words,
be so honored,
*by a poem
truly worthy
of this*
miraculous
conception
Mar 29, 2025
Mar 29, 2025 at 8:31 AM UTC
The Artist
I need a Muse.
Do you think it could be you?
Can you pick up a paint brush
And show me what you can do?
I need a painter of portraits;
To fill in the gaps inside my head.
I need a Goddess of Love,
To notice the stuff I write in my bed.
I need an Artist, who is simply magnificent,
A breath-taking vision, who is simply Heaven sent.
I need an Angel to paint me a Picasso,
Of my poetry in pieces, before I end up like Van Gogh.
Slightly impaired by deafness, I guess.
Going grey now; thank you stress.
Hi Mona, how’s Rembrandt?
He’s been seen drinking in a bar,
With someone called Cezanne?
Call Michelangelo; Donatello will have a plan.
Leonardo’s busy with his inventions,
But here comes Raphael.
Turtle Power! Hi Master Splinter.
Do you have your easel and paints ready,
To see you through the winter?
Paint me a story
And I’ll write you a picture.
I think if the two of us worked together,
What I see, to you, could become much clearer.
Are you sat there looking for some inspiration?
Then read one of my poems, sing one of my songs;
Maybe then you could paint our creation.
Maybe then, I could write poetry about your art.
My vision brought to life,
With the gift of your care.
Paint a picture of us together,
So you will remember that I will always be there.
If you ever need some inspiration,
Just creep inside my mind for a little vacation;
An escape from reality, or from your personal Demon’s.
You will see we are all the same;
I have as many foibles as you do.
My heart belongs to any Woman who truly wants it;
But she hasn’t told me how she feels yet,
So I guess I can’t live without it.
But soon I will meet someone
And offer them my love;
Because an artist without inspiration,
Is like a poet who has never been in love.
Joyous tragedy! Shakespeare laughs,
As he tears apart love with just a couple of paragraphs.
Dead and gone! Not our fair Juliet.
If Romeo had just gone home instead,
He would have turned into a moody poet.
(C)2011 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.
Apr 23, 2018
Apr 23, 2018 at 5:31 PM UTC
the orange sweater
harbinger of autumn..
this leaf coloration reminds and
a warm texture promises
fall sunshine and wind chills..
these thoughts and perceptions
we might observe
as paul cezanne
checked out his carrot
with revolutionary results..
inviting the ordinary
to expose Itself...!
Sep 12, 2018
Sep 12, 2018 at 7:35 PM UTC