A Cubist Notebook on Cézanne

He painted apples. There they are:
eighteen reddish orange, greenish yellow spheres,
lodged on hidden coins.
A wicker basket on a table top,
tipped on a block of wood.
*
Monet was just an eye
that caught on gleams.
Cézanne, too, painted surfaces.
Mottled russets, a blotch of green,
a primrose swipe: snug, now,
to the mind’s hand, indestructible.
*
Birds aren’t fooled. A harmony
of paint’s no harmony of fruit.
*
It’s thinkable to put a price-tag
on an apple in a cornucopia.
To stick one on an apple by Cézanne
‘s absurd, like asking Mona Lisa round for tea.
*
He left himself aside. No one
paints apples like Cézanne.
*
The eye keeps coming back to
what it’s seeing
for the first time now.
*
He spied with his concentric eye
the world’s geometry.
*
Grumpy, diabetic, getting old,
slave to his eye,
to obstinate paint.
*
His eye was rinsed. It stripped
the mouldy skins: the bulging Horn,
the Vanitas, the plausible Tree.
*
Each apple burns itself.
It is the sun, solidified.
*
He swallowed all his love for them,
as Rilke said, and gave it rest in paint.

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