Two After Paul Cezanne, by Ruth Hoberman

The Rocks at Fountainblue, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1890s

Cézanne’s The Rocks at Fontainebleau

You’d get nowhere among those purple slabs
(boulders, walruses or buttocks, who knows which?) but thick: 
nothing you could walk between or through.
 
Amazing how those slim Aleppo pines squeeze in.
My only friends are trees, Cézanne said. Such grace in their reach 
toward that grayish-purple sky.
 
But I feel fallen, looking: decked in green scruff
with granite feet; and then I’m ten again and numb, 
staring at the print I’ve hung on my wall,
 
imagining the cool of it, the dark, while downstairs 
giants squabble. All foreground and stumbling, 
the world then.

In the Bebemus Quarry, by Paul Cezanne (France) 1900-1904

Cézanne at Bibémus Quarry

Limestone suits me--
the way it rumbles on about scale and time--
fissured, fallen, gouged, 
but not done. My thin washes 
stave nothing off, 
brushstrokes broken 
by green broken 
by broken ochre rock.
 
The quarryman, 
that tiny slip of flesh, bakes
in earth’s red oven. I forget 
what formal need he fills. 
His neck must ache like mine 
from staring up. At what?
 
The soil’s persistence, 
the chaos of gray in those clouds,
a few streaks of shrubbery, 
rosemary, thyme. Thank god
for the Aleppo pines. 
 
Twisted and pulled by sun, 
they scorn me 
with such an air of distinction.

Ruth Hoberman

Ruth Hoberman lives in Newtonville, Massachusetts.  Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in various journals, most recently in Salamander, RHINO, Mezzo Cammin, and SWWIM Every Day.  

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