Blues Aubade (or, Revision of the Lean Post-Modernist Pastorale)

I'm going to work in the holy name of Cézanne somewhere in here, but first, let's say I take a walk with my spade to safe, blank territory, and then surely I'll dig to distraction in spongy loam, then see petals spread, a chorus round a lazy eye, then reach an epiphany—the importance of memory— which necessitates a recollection of a lover lying on a bed sheet, his sparrow-boned hand gesturing vaguely toward me. At this point, there is early light filtering through the glass of wine so clean, almost white on the bedside table. Then I'll find a reason to conjure Cézanne— Cézanne!— as my excuse to discuss the poems he painted on canvas. Before I start meditating on the apple's green buttock, I hope there is time for a second walk to another field that breaks me down, for prayer and work, the precarious undoing of my birth. Boss man calling me out of my name, hoe over my shoulder to attack the hard crust. Some cotton, some peaches, weighty heat of this harvest— I remember my baby when we parted this morning. We loved, we cried, O never enough! We squeezed the scuppernong into spirit, drank it down gladly. Brother Bearden had a relief for this kind of life, a collage of agrarian truths. In this picture, see the woman carved into the foreground of sweat? And there—over there—way in the corner? Now, that's a rooster crowing up a revolution.