The Art of Poetry No. 78
“Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . . ”
“Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . . ”
signal the presence of a river.
A side road leads us on—
parched grass, a rock horizon—
The sun flung out at the foot of the tree
A perfect shadow on snow: we found that we
Were suddenly walking through this replica,
The limbs of the giant spruce that leans
So close to the house, have formed
A kind of stair, a walkway
I listened hard. I do not believe in ghosts.
The house was changing. Indeed, I never saw
Such thorough renovation.“You do not know,”
to leave it empty on the shores of time,
and shining, will mean to live and write
Scrub and stone, show me
a passage through to set me free
But here at a thousand metres and more in the Apennines
hasn’t time come round again with summer
What is it the fishers who crouch at the river bends
Hope to hook from this discolored water?
All this he must do with a brush? All this
With a brush, a touch, a thought—
Till the time-filled forms are ripening in their places,
Reading this, you are waiting for the curtain
To go up on a glade, vistaed valley
Or colonnade of lath. Yet you are not here
A door:
PER L’UNIVERSO
is what it says
Ranges
of clinker heaps
go orange now:
Rock reproduces rock
In miniature
On rock
The seascape shifts
Between the minutest interstices of time
Blue is blue.