Cezanne's Table, by Lyn Coffin

The Basket of Apples, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1893.

Cezanne's Table            
                      
"Cezanne's The Basket of Apples is full of what appear to be 'mistakes' but are actually artistic choices...."  Quizlet: Art Chapter 4 Flash Cards

Nothing could be simpler or more enticing.
A nice snack set out on a wooden table: 
a basket of apples, a bottle of wine,  
a plate of cookies (or biscuits?) piled on 

a plate. Of course, some apples have rolled
out of the basket, (tilted, you note,
balanced precariously on the table)
onto the tablecloth, which hangs over the edge of

the table you belatedly discover 
is strangely made. (Are there apples on the floor?)
The wine is corked and there's no corkscrew-- not
one you can see. And how did those biscuits (or 

cookies?) get stacked like that, with the top two 
standing up, as if to rudely reprove
modern architecture. You start to see where
needful things are missing from the table

besides the corkscrew-- like a wineglass, a chair.
The fruit on the far right of the table
looks like a pear, not so round, more stable
than its cousins. But how could fruit have rolled

from the basket onto the table and come
to stud a cloth that sometimes hangs above them
in artfully chosen, orchestrated folds
like a sea of frozen whitecaps? And what keeps

the basket from sliding until it's flat on 
the table? Someone has arranged this scene- and 
not to invoke eating or drinking. One slight 
motion would suffice to make the basket slide 

down, knock over the full bottle which will smash
the biscuits, fall off the table, and crash 
to the floor among stray apples, shattering 
to shards like a glass bud: blood-dark wine will spill. 

This table warns us like a trap: everything 
is in balance until someone tries to move.
 
Lyn Coffin

Lyn Coffin has published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose, most notably The First Honeymoon (Iron Twine Press), a collection of her short fiction, and her poetic translation of Shota Rustaveli's 12th century epic (Poezia Press.) Lyn has twice been a Wordsworth Poet in Seattle. Her poetry has won an National Endowment for the Humanities award and a Michigan Council for the Arts grant. She has taught at several American Universities, (Michigan, Detroit, Washington), as well as in Malaysia and Georgia. Widely praised translations include Standing on Earth, by Mohsen Emadi, (PhonemeMedia Press), translated from Iranian, with the author’s collaboration (9/2016) and The Adventures of a Boy Named Piccolo (Salamura), by Archil Sulakauri, translated from Georgian with Veronica Muskheli.

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