The Ghost of Madame Cézanne
Madame Cézanne
Haunts my study
In ghostlike apparition
She appears
Again and again
With cheeks painted a bit too red
And makeup caked across her face
Each time I see her
I think she wears
The countenance of strife
The shades of sadness
She never speaks but
Sits silently in a chair
Posed in resentment
Her eyes angry openings
Her mouth closed and pouting
Her jaw clenched
A face hard
And humorless
She is a model of domestic troubles
Wearing a green hat
Bad Weather
Whenever I saw him
I felt the cold
A kind of deep chill
That passed through me
Numbing my insides
And the ice that formed
On the outer edges of my words
Was skin tingling
In the same way
His kisses were snowflakes
Melting on my cheeks
I would always wish him gone
Just as I would hope
For winter's passing
And long for a trace of color
In the pencil sketch landscape
That is February
And now that he is
A season past
There is mildness in the air
And a stirring in the earth
Of things ready to grow
Wings
Touching her in darkness
My hands fly
Across her skin like winged things
Hovering for a moment
Then gliding in sweeping motions
That rise and dive to follow her form
Aerial in their grace
Ethereal in movement
And when they come to rest
Like a bird upon a perch
They are weightless
And she feels only a fluttering
A brush of feathers
Across her flesh
On a night
When touch became sight
Alter Road
In summer children play in the front yards
With hair disheveled and dirty faces
Amid wooden frame homes
Ill kempt and needing repair
That line the street and sit wedged
Side by side and close to the road
Looking neither right nor left
In silence I pass them
The children continue to play as if I were invisible
Like a visitor from a nether world or some ghost
From the hereafter who has come down their street
Just to say hi how are ya
But my mouth cannot bear the banality
Of such an average greeting to interrupt their play
For they are to me the poorly dressed reminders
Of a past troublesome and grim
Of days when childhood rested on me
Like an affliction both serious and dire
On this dark street like a Dickens novel
If I stop to talk to one child
I would be addressing my own pain
On a street crowded with regrets
Where problems pile up on the curb
Like the belongings of evicted tenants
Potatoes
I stood before a pile of potatoes
In the grocery store today
That somehow strangely seemed
To awaken memories in me
For they were large
With irregular bulges and scars
With a sandpaper texture
Dirty and rough
Like my father's hands
And in the middle of crowded store
I stood alone touching the potatoes
Running my hands over their skin
Gently stroking them
Caressing them
Cupping their roughness and
Holding them in my palms for a long time
Eggplant
It is tear shaped for this fruit is the face
Of the battered wife whose
Bruised and beaten flesh
Is ebony with traces of cobalt blue
Like summer nights just after sunset
With Oranges
I thought today of her awakening
Her movements a shadow
In the predawn darkness
A phantom floating
No more than a chimera of shape
A nude that Picasso might sketch
No more than a few sloping lines that curve
Toward soft inclines and rise gently
Toward feathered intersections
And fall toward full divergence
Backlit in silhouette from the bedroom window
Her breasts and buttocks
The simple elegance of lines in
Erotic waves and fluid motion
And as she moves near
I smell the citrus of orange slices
That is the fragrance and scent
That forms a perfumed wake as she passes
And the "sh" and "ch" sounds of her dressing
Are a bird's wings flapping
A slight rustling of fabric
A finch in the shrub
I am the slave of her motion
The serf of her smells
The prisoner of her naked beauty
Who wakes each morning in bondage
To the changing shape of curves
To the texture of delicate sound
And a still life with oranges
Las Sandias
In Rivera's painting melons are
Sliced and resting ripe crimson
Bordered in bone-white rind open
And inviting on a green wooden table
That is the matching color of the melon
Skins themselves and veins of black seeds
Dot through the meat and accent its
Redness and deepen its lushness
The one piece bitten waits for the unseen
Hand that set it down to pick it up again
And lift it to lips and tongue that are the
Matching color of the melon's ripeness
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