Masterworks Series: The Card Players

Pipes and Perspective

Rainy days bring farmers inside

Waiting for nature

To allow their tending and tilling.

The card table calls

To men seeking to avoid

The boredom of delay;
A game of chance and skill
To pass the time.

Smoking his clay pipe

He leans against the wall

Observing the game.
Giving no indication,

He quietly calculates.

Knowing what he would do with that hand,

Wondering what the player will do,
He watches the game unfold.

Awaiting the next round,

He is readying himself for involvement.

A farmer never simply waits.

Whether stopping for rest

Or halting for the elements,

His mind is at work
Considering his options
Contemplating the next move.

Working with the hand he is dealt,

A peasant farmer moves diligently

To influence the outcome.

Living in connection with the earth,

He knows his limits

And constantly adjusts,
Hoping that the fields
Will grant a good harvest.

One bad hand would bring despair

Were it not for the knowledge

That there will be another.

So he pauses –

Sharpening his mind,

Puffing his pipe,     

Waiting for a new deck

And a seat at the table.

                                                 ~ CK 

__________________________
Image: The Card Players at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artist: Paul Cézanne (French,1839–1906)
Date: 1890–92
Medium: Oil on canvas

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Masterworks Series: Mont Sainte-Victoire

Unbound View

That one span of human engineering

Traces the valley floor

Bringing railway to the village

And symmetry to the eye.

Sheer mathematics of stone and mortar

Make a straight line excursion

Across the gentle lively curves of fields and hills.

What did they see,

Those builders who labored

As they put the viaduct in place?

Did their eye catch the expansive flow of the valley?

Did they view the stark unchangeable rising of the mountain?

Yet that human endeavor

Would change the perception

Of the eye that would come to

Look out over the valley –

Where tree and viaduct

Divide the seen world

Into four equal corners.

Without the intrusion of human structure

The scene would flow

Uncontained by form or thought.

Only now the human eye

Makes a quadrant

Where everything finds its place

In one box, or another.

And the whole is contained

In a singular notion.

But when that viaduct crumbles

The eye will once more see

A world unbound by constructs and corners;
A world unbound by constructs and corners.

                                                                                ~ CK

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Image: Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Artist: Paul Cézanne (French 1839-1906)
Date:1882-1885

Medium: Oil on canvas

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