Beneath the Midi Sun
Beneath the Midi Sun (2021) complements in design Two Lenses--- Four Europes and includes 55 poems and 58 photographs from five of our winter stays in different small villages in southern France. The regions are several, as are our subjects: geological, natural, political, and religious history; the art of Cezanne, Maillol, Matisse, Renoir, Van Gogh; contemporary country life and landscape.
Softcover copies are available from Shanti Arts Publishing, Independent Bookstores, and online distributors. Hardcover Collectors Edition copies are available only from Shanti Arts Publishing.
Fine Work with Shears
Trained trunks with two arms
equidistant from each other
sweep in perfect rows straight
as rail tracks from roadside
to impenetrable woodlands.
In paths of clay and sandstone
a husband and wife full-bodied
as their dark red wine prune vines,
quick-snip without mercy stems
of doubtful character, cut
errant tails of spurs back to three
chosen buds for broad summer leaves
to catch sun, for fruit to stain
lips. Their labor easeful in this
warm demi-Eden of little rain
and strong winds where eugenics
flourishes free of moral qualm.
The Monks of Le Thoronet
worked and prayed, prayed and worked,
followed strict St. Benedict
as naturally as their monastery
followed its slope of land. Lives
distant from a world that devoured
souls whole, a refuge inside rough
walls with pure springs to nourish.
Hands-on in garden, mill, bakery;
hands pressed in silence for chapel.
No figure on their cross, no icons
to distract or weigh them down
beyond a few palms, water leaves,
flowers carved in the Chapter House.
Liturgical chants in their church
still echo off unadorned walls lit
by clear glass. Engineered simplicity
eight hundred years ago for light
to sing with stone, stone with light.
Bronze Portrait with Sunflowers
Van Gogh cast mid-step walking
to his room with kill in hands.
Brows knit, corners of his mouth
downcast like the sunflowers
he carries. There can be no honest
acceptance of his act, his heart
despondent at how the flowers must
pay for his art. Right hand fingers
one gently, its seeded head weary
of time bent toward the ground.
Left hand grips four stalks cut
razor clean, their heads cradled
in his arm catching last breath.
In the studio he’ll arrange them
artfully, give them a glory
they never had in fields, turn
fading yellow petals with sun spots
into solar flares of paint. But
here a split second caught for
a monochrome tribute to both flowers
and painter who die like stars.
Dolmen Huntress
She’s off again this morning
armed with phone to track rocks
on Minerve’s limestone plateau,
find every tiny amphora icon
on her GPS screen. Above gorge
and beyond vineyards kermes oak,
shrubby boxwood, and asphodel
go unnoticed; scents of thyme,
lavender, orchid waft too subtle
for her to trace. She has no
interest in raptors overhead
or hints of boar on the path.
Her passion simply bare-bones
of stone, the ways they stand,
lean, have fallen. Ceremonial
sites stripped naked of tumulus,
chambers hollowed of artifacts,
capstones seemingly lifted by
goliaths. She can never know
the people or why they labored
like oxen five thousand years ago
to anchor each megalith, set
in place each block. Praise be
the mysteries of rock and man.
Wood and Glass
St. Bernard chapel on the manicured
grass grounds of Fondation Maeght
is not so austere as the saint would
have liked. Nonetheless, he stands
like a sentry outside chiseled in stone
and thought for the wooden man inside.
Christ unblemished. Body pristine, head
without a trace of thorns, face tranquil
in sleep deep as understanding. Braque’s
dove flies above toward the waning moon,
barely clears our natural world of tree
in leaf, flower bed, pot of shoots.
Last Days with the River Arc
It was play when Cezanne and Zola swam
as boys in this river, skipped stones
over ripples Monet would have loved
to paint. It was hard work for the old
man seated hunched on its cool bank
the last blistering summer of his life,
hump-backed bridge above a scythe
to set aquiver leaves of trees and blue,
yellow, violet brushwood at river’s edge.
In his atelier in Aix on a mechanical
easel those trees anchored in that bank
become an arbor to shade a community
of women at lavation, their bodies angled
like pines swaying above summer waters.
The first nature, the second art.
Both white heat to the painter.