Mont Sainte-Victoire
In a college class in 2009 I wrote two poems about a painting within a series of paintings by Paul Cézanne. The name of the class was "The Writing of Poetry". The series of paintings is named "Mont Sainte-Victoire". Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain ridge in the south of France.²
Below are the poems, with slight updates. The photo is one of the paintings in the series.
First poem:
I wake up this morning
drawn to my easel,
the edges of a dream
still circulating
I hunch over, blinking
before choosing colors
Lining up the tubes:
yellow, orange, milky blue
Drawing my bathrobe
together at the collar,
I pause, agaze through the soft-lit window
Lost in the warm sun
This looking out the window
seems to last an eternity
And when I return, no longer floating
I am again Paul: again a painter
Second poem:
A freshly woken mind
from a midday nap projected
onto the ill-defined edges,
the windy country roads,
and spacious fields between the homesteads
White cloud and blue mountain
float in muted synchrony
beyond the sunshine hamlet
and its aqueduct
Sources:
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-Mont_Sainte-Victoire_and_the_Viaduct_of_the_Arc_River_Valley(Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art).jpg
²: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagne_Sainte-Victoire
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