The Double Realm

Reflections in the Water

by Paul Cézanne

Only he who lifts his lyre
in the Underworld as well
may come back
to praising, endlessly.

Only he who has eaten
the food of the dead
will make music so clear
that even the softest tone is heard.

Though the reflection in the pool
often ripples away,
take the image within you.

Only in the double realm
do our voices carry
all they can say.

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 9

The Capacity to Be Alone

Girl, by Paul Cézanne

Could there be a solitude that had no value to it? There is only one solitude; it is vast and hard to bear. How often do we gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial and cheap, or trade it for the appearance of agreement, however small, with the first person who comes along. But those may be the very moments when your solitude can grow; its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But don't be confused. All that is needed is the capacity to be alone with yourself, to go into yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you need to achieve. To be alone, the way you were as a child, when the grown-ups walked around so busy and distracted by matters that seemed important because they were beyond your comprehension.

Rome, December 23, 1903

Letters to a Young Poet

All Will Come Again into Its Strength

Mont Saint-Victoire, 1867

by Paul Cézanne

All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.

From The Book of Hours II, 25

In Your Sight

Still Life with Italian Earthenware Jar

by Paul Cézanne

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for when I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.

The Book of Hours I, 13

The Things I Am

The Artist's Mother

by Paul Cézanne

I would describe myself
like a landscape I've studied
at length, in detail;
like a word I'm coming to understand;
like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime;
like my mother's face;
like a ship that carried me
when the waters raged.

From The Book of Hours I, 13

When Time Stops

In the Forest of Fontainebleu

by Paul Cézanne

In the fading forest a bird call sounds.
How out of place in a fading forest.
And yet the bird call roundly rests
in this moment that it made,
as wide as the sky above the fading forest.

All things sound together in that cry:
the whole land seems to lie within it,
the great wind seems to rest within it,
and the moment, which wants to persist,
stops, still, as if knowing things
arising from that cry
that you would have to die to know.

Book of Images

What I Want

Rocks at L'Estaque, by Paul Cézanne

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

The Book of Hours I, 14

Our Invisible Property

A Painter at Work, by Paul Cézanne

The experience and inclination and affection we put into familiar things cannot be replaced. We are perhaps the last who still will have known such things. On us is the responsibility not only to remember them, but to know their value.

The earth has no other recourse but to become invisible in us, who belong in part to what is invisible; and our own invisible property can increase during our span here.

Letter to Witold Hulewicz

November 13, 1925

To Meet and Be Met

study of an apple, by Paul Cézanne

I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to the world.

I know nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

From The Book of Hours I, 1

Bell

Forest, by Paul Cézanne

Sound, no longer defined
by our hearing. As though the tone
that encircles us
were space itself expanding.

Uncollected Poems

Here Is the Time for Telling

A Modern Olympia

by Paul Cézanne

Here is the time for telling. Here is its home.
Speak and make known: More and more
the things we could experience
are lost to us, banished by our failure
to imagine them.
Old definitions, which once
set limits to our living,
break apart like dried crusts.

From the Ninth Duino Elegy

Leaving Paradise

Winding Road in Provence

by Paul Cézanne

Be our refuge from the wrath
that drove us out of Paradise.

Be our shepherd, but never call us—
we can't bear to know what's ahead.

From The Book of Hours I, 44

The Open

Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Gardanne

by Paul Cézanne

With their whole gaze
animals behold the Open.
Only our eyes
are as though reversed
and set like traps around us,
keeping us inside.
That there is something out there
we know only from the creatures' countenance.

We turn even the young child around,
making her look backward
at the forms we create,
not outward into the Open.

From the Eighth Duino Elegy

We Stand in Your Garden

Bend in the Forest Road

by Paul Cézanne

Lord, we are more wretched than the animals
who do their deaths once and for all,
for we are never finished with our not dying.

Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

We stand in your garden year after year.
We are trees for yielding a sweet death.
But fearful, we wither before the harvest.

The Book of Hours III; 8

A New Morning

Apples with napkin, by Paul Cézanne

And today, once again, a new morning: bright, with close, rounded clouds that frame expanses of the immeasurably deep sky. Agitation in the treetops. In everything else, restfulness. Windfall of apples. The grass softly invites you to walk out of the house. The dimness inside is alive with lights on antique silver, and their reflections in the looking glass confuse the eye as to what is enclosed within the mirror's frame.

There are so many days here, none like any other. And beneath all their differences is this great similarity: the gratitude in which they are received.

Early Journals

Autumn Day

Autumn

by Paul Cézanne

Lord, the time has come. Summer was abundant.
Cast your shadows over the sundial,
across the fields unleash your winds.

Command the final fruits to ripen.
Grant them two more southern days,
bring them to fullness and press
their last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who now has no house will not build one.
Who now is alone will remain alone,
will read into the night, write long letters,
and, restless, wander streets
where leaves are blowing.

Book of Images

And God Said to Me, Write:

Mont Saint-Victoire, by Paul Cézanne

Leave the cruelty to kings.
Without that angel barring the way to love
there would be no bridge for me
into time.

From The Book of Hours I, 53

Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes (V)

Landscape, by Paul Cézanne

Eurydice was no longer the fair beauty
celebrated in Orpheus' singing,
no longer the fragrance and landscape of the bed,
no more the property of any man.

She was already unbound, like loosened hair,
surrendered like falling rain,
and generously offered to all creation.
She was already root.

And when, suddenly,
the god held her back and with anguish
spoke the words: he has turned around,
she was puzzled and softly answered, Who?

Up ahead, dark against the brightness of a gateway,
stood someone whose features she did not recognize.
He stood and saw how on the pale ribbon of the meadow path
the messenger god had silently turned
to watch the form of one retracing her steps,
constricted by the winding sheets,
uncertain, meek, without impatience.

New Poems

Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes (IV)

Chateau Noir, Paul Cézanne

Now Eurydice walked at the hand of a god,
her steps, constricted by the winding sheets,
uncertain, meek, without impatience.
She was deep within herself like a woman full with child,
and gave no thought now to the man who walked ahead
or the path that rose toward life.
She was deep within herself, and her having died
was a fullness she carried.
Like a fruit, she was filled with the sweetness
and darkness of her huge death,
still so new she could hardly grasp it.

She had entered a new virginity,
had becomes untouchable; her sex had closed
like a wildflower toward evening,
and her hands were so estranged from marriage
that even the god's touch, infinitely light,
disturbed her as too familiar.

New Poems

Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes (III)

Landscape with brook, by Paul Cézanne

He told himself they must be coming.
He said the words aloud and heard them fade away.
They must be coming, it was just
that they were moving so quietly.
If he might turn a single time
(if to look back were not the ruin
of this whole venture now near completion),
surely he would see those two
following him so noiselessly.
The little god of journeys and messages,
winged cap above observant eyes,
wings at the ankles too, slender staff held out before him,
and entrusted to his left hand: her.

The one so loved, that from a single lyre
more lament came forth than from centuries' sorrows.
So loved that a world took form from that lament
where everything came to be once more:
path and village, forest and valley, field, river, animal.

And round this lamenting world, as if
it were a second earth, moved a sun and star-strewn heavens,
a grieving heaven with grief-stricken stars.
That's how loved she was.

New Poems