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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

A TERRIFYING DEATH by Daniil Kharms (translated by Alex Cigale)

Once upon a time, a man, feeling hungry, sat at the table and ate cutlets. Beside him sat his wife, rambling on about the cutlets not containing enough pork. Nevertheless he ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, until he sensed somewhere in the pit of his stomach a morbid heaviness. In that […]

The Heights
by Robin Reagler

Hoohooooooo a man kneels down before an even more powerful man his hand imagines a cat with lonely fur curtain            seltzer weapon          lover as the train whistle scratches the face of distances a powerless man lives with phrases stuck in his head the barber’s neck, the barbarian’s necklace and weather frets as it […]

Six Poems by Anna Matysiak
from Inbred Machines: (The Difference and the Repetition), translated from the Polish by Peter Burzyński

the queen wasp / opens her first pair of arms. / she convulses in the right chamber like / how nails sanctify a board.

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