Three After Gustave Caillebotte, by John Fadely

Les Raboteurs de Parquet (The Floor Planers), by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1875

The Floor Planers
 
scrape shavings of light off dull wood
and to Caillebotte hovering above
abrade his canvas that will be rejected
by the Salon for being realistic and
vulgar and criticized by Zola as
bourgeois and vulgar but the painter paints
what he sees: three planers
on their knees, backs arching into
the work, half-stripped like
the floor, pass over it plank by
plank, one mind in conversation,
skin pulled taut across their ribs
gleaming in a varnish of light, then
turn along the slant to what’s
next, resting only for cheap wine
from a shared glass once they’ve bared
it, like a painting before the vernissage
when it’s unfinished and
done.
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Young Man at His Window, by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1876

Young Man at His Window 
 
Though his reflection is already halfway  
out the glass door, the balcony holds
his weight in Haussmann’s new Paris:
René, up from the velvet sitting chair 
on his heels, legs akimbo, watches 
floating above the stone balustrade  
the silhouette of the mother of 
the children he won’t live to have, 
or the chalky apartment blocks 
or the shadow they cast over her alone  
down on the boulevard, wistful only as 
one born old can be wistful as he goes. 
At his back, his older brother applies 
the last strokes of René’s black suit 
inking a carpet of primrose.

Paris Street Rainy Day, by Gustave Caillebotte (France) 1877

 
Paris Street, Rainy Day

Just before their umbrellas collide –
a distracted couple strolling down
 
the sidewalk and the cropped
half of a man wearing half a top hat –
 
veering, the husband falls through
the cobbled street that glistens like
 
a harbor in which the prow
of an angled building docks.
 
That year, pedestrians in ones and twos
skim across the boulevard
 
and Caillebotte returns again
and again to the moment on which
 
his replicas depend –
pavement not yet ruptured,
 
the husband’s final measured stride – 
 mapping in quiet quadrants
 
what soon will be, then
decamps to the countryside.
 
Streets seal shut.
Photographers descend.

John Fadely

John Fadely’s debut book, Before Leaving the Island, won the 2025 Trail to Table (an imprint of Wandering Aengus Press) Book Award in Poetry and will be published in April 2026.  After 29 years in Asia practicing law, John wrote Before Leaving the Island as part of journey from Hong Kong through Singapore – both islands – to California.  He is co-translating an illustrated edition of Tang dynasty poetry for publication by Princeton University Press.  
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