ONE OF MY FATHER'S AND ONE OF MINE

THE EGG AND THE STONE

"Oh eggs, never fight with stones!"  Chinese proverb

Always suspicious

Wary and vulnerable

Eggs walk on eggshells.

Stones crowd the sidewalk -

Eggs slink by invisibly

Wishing they were stones.

Stones and eggs once friends.

When friends fall out, eggs notice,

It's not stones that break.

When eggs tell stories

They tell of the giant egg

Who will avenge them.

Egg philosophers:

"To improve our characters

Heaven sends us stones."

Eggs negotiate:

You don't drop us out of windows

And we won't splatter.

Seeking a way out,

Eggs make rules for stones to live;

Now - teach stones to read.

Eggs resolve: We're soft -

To stop stones from killing us

We must become stones.

A PHOTOGRAPH

The hat looks proper – perhaps a bit jaunty

With its brim curled slightly, but unbattered

The white-haired man beneath it, the artist Cezanne,

Seems drunk, though cheerful, leaning in a doorway,

Emerging from a shadowed house into the light

Of a dazzling Provencal morning.

Photos can lie; perhaps he is not drunk at all --

Still, he has donned the clothes of a larger man;

His cuffs spill over his shoes; the bottom of his vest

Is unbuttoned. The chair he holds was stolen

From a dream Van Gogh once had;

All wobbled lines and strange proportions.

So small an old man in such large clothes

Might be blown for miles. I  believe Cezanne,

Knowing this, grasps the Dutchman’s chair

So he can sit when the winds are done with him.