Mont Sainte-Victoire
In a college class in 2009, I wrote two poems in "response" to a painting within a series of paintings by Paul Cézanne. The name of the college class was "The Writing of Poetry". The series of paintings by Cézanne is titled "Mont Sainte-Victoire". Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain ridge in the south of France.²
Below are the poems, with slight updates. I can't remember which painting in the series I was looking at when writing the poems. It may have been the one pictured above. All the paintings in the series are of the same landscape with the mountain ridge.
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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