Conversation with Paul Cézanne
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Cézanne, still dauntless on your daily treks To paint Mont Sainte-Victoire from day to day; You clash with all your friends, recluse of Aix, Return to childhood’s chestnut-lined allée. Distrustful, trenchant, unpraised banker’s son, Both full of doubts and fed by complex pride, Your best-loved paintings, paintings not yet done— A falling short that’s never satisfied. Your father’s trees unleaf each falling year, Turn arabesques both bare and angular; Your eyes in love with luminous ripe spheres Keep glorying a still-lifed ginger jar And unities of tone-dissolving bright— Long live the sun that grants such stunning light.
As boys Zola and I both learn to dream In words and paint, refusing to conform To bourgeois norms; while still at school we scheme How we’ll take Paris and the world by storm. My father’s disapproval salts a sore; A prodigal and guilty breakaway, I can’t just call myself a refuse— I’ll dare keep knocking on the Salon’s door. Courbet and Delacroix imbued my youth, Pissarro taught me much and fathered me; But now I fall in love with light and shade And learn to trust myself to paint the truth Of sailors, fruits and skulls – the things I see; My art’s creation’s ardour re-arrayed.
Zola reneged, Monet, Degas, Renoir— Outsiders all—by now well moved inside; Though you’re rebuffed, a critic’s bête noire, Yet such neglect self-faith somehow defied. So long an outcast, loner blunt and brusque – [End Page 256] Still younger men get under your thin skin; You change and open up, a spiky husk Whose wariness conceals its seed within. ‘ A line’s a meeting place for coloured planes’ or ‘ light and shadow angles should concur’‘God’s sun’, you say, ‘ paints all the world contains’— And leave for vespers at Le Saint-Sauveur. Your heaven reached still layer by painful layer— Was every stroke a slowly entered prayer?
I learned to let the colours draw for me To soak my senses in each liquid zone; Although I seek Poussin’s calm clarity, Nuancing shapes in tight mosaics of tone. I still refuse to kiss the fashion’s rod— Our insights turned to blotchy in-betweens— Once a certain age, there’s only God Whose reds and blues and yellows, blacks and greens Re-radiate from rocks and chestnut trees Or waistcoats, plums and smokers’ playing cards, A millstone, bathers in their bare delight, The caves near Château Noir, a man’s chemise; There’s nothing God’s hued glory disregards; All beauty’s light within a greater light. [End Page 257]
Micheal O’Siadhail is an Irish poet by birth, and a recent New Yorker by choice. His latest publications include Collected Poems (Bloodaxe 2113), Say but the Word: Vision and Voice in Poetry (Hinds, 2015) and One Crimson Thread (Bloodaxe, 2015). Awarded an Irish American Cultural Institute prize for poetry in 1981 and the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998, he was a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1988–93), and is distinguished poet-in-residence at the Union Seminary (NYC). The larger collection from which this poem is taken is entitled The Five Quintets (Baylor University Press, forthcoming in 2018). www.osiadhail.com.
