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The Shape of Things by George Moore

October 1, 2013 Contributed By: George Moore

Look at this painting
squared by light of
a certain afternoon hour,

hung on the wall out
of reach of the dead,
who were to blame.

See the red roofs
and the boxes, spared
by his new infinity?

Cezanne lost his sight
to oceans, repetition,
the impossible wave.

The ocean was an idea
mounting the sky,
burnt ferruginous blue,

as if there never was
such a blue,
by a minute’s light,

surfaces blending,
the walls fading to hay
beneath the sun’s weight.

They say his eyes
were not right from a time
early in his childhood;

that made him pass
so easily from one plane
to another, from road

to wall, to sea,
unstymied by distances.
No word could capture

what he truly saw,
no word for what seeing
must have been.

Hardened nightmare
of colors.  Then,
consecrated into history.

But in time, place becomes
real: Auvers, Arc Valley,
La Roche-Guyon.

Nothing but fever
for how little we actually
see, when we are seeing.

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 7 Summer 2013

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2013

Further Reading

Double Life: photographs
by Kelli Connell

photography by Kelli Connell         Return to table of contents for Issue 10 Fall 2016.

My Beloved Addresses Me with One Last Pastoral1
by Michaela Mayer 

“the lips of the lake / produce no fruit”

I Cried Because You Told Me
by Abdulqader S. Al-Ghamdi, translated from the Arabic by Essam M. Al-Jassim

I recall the prickly pear shrub that never failed to pierce me as I tucked my skinny body behind it, trying to hide…

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