Sitting at Night

(Still Life with Apples by Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906, French
Post-Impressionist painter)

“‘Stay’ is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.” ~ Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, the writer of Little Women

SITTING AT NIGHT

A quiet valley with no man’s footprints,
An empty garden lit by the moon.
Suddenly my dog barks and I know
A friend with a bottle is knocking at the gate.

~ Ŏm Ŭi-Gil, seventeenth-century Korean poet

How Can We Ever Lose Interest in Life?

(The Gardener by Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906,
French Post-Impressionist artist)

We have come to the end of our month of poems about spring. Those verses were in anticipation. Now the year’s at the spring and we can celebrate the season’s actual arrival.

How can we ever lose interest in life?
Spring has come again
And cherry trees bloom in the mountains.

~ Ryokan (1758-1831), Japanese poet, hermit, and Buddhist monk

The Great Pine

(The Great Pine by Paul Cézanne, 1839-1906, French
Post-Impressionist painter)

William Blake is not the only artist who brought his poems to life with his own illustrations.

In 1858, Paul Cézanne wrote to a friend, the writer Émile Zola, about a memory from his youth:

“Do you remember the pine on the bank of the Arc, with its hairy head projecting above the abyss at its foot? This pine which protected our bodies with its foliage from the heat of the sun, oh! may the gods preserve it from the woodman’s baleful axe!”

Five years later, Cézanne composed a short verse about the same tree. And in the 1880's, he painted at least three images that followed up on this verse, two in watercolor and the one above in oils.

THE GREAT PINE

The tree shaken by the fury of the winds
Stirs its stripped branches in the air,
An immediate cadaver that the mistral* swings.

(*mistral - cold northern wind that blows in the French Mediterranean region)

From Blossoms

(Apples, Peaches, Pears, and Grapes by Paul
Cézanne, 1839-1906, French Post-Impressionist
painter)

“Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine whether [sic] and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat Regent or the Duke of Wellington,” wrote John Keats to his sister Fanny, on August 28, 1819. “I should like now to promenade round you[r] Gardens — apple tasting — pear tasting — plum judging — apricot nibbling — peach scrunching — Nectarine-sucking and Melon carving.”

FROM BLOSSOMS

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee, American poet born 1957 in Indonesia to Chinese parents after they fled political turmoil in China