I thought I would write a novel
about the window with its shadow
set in the two-story house.
Cezanne stands at the sunchoke hedge,
alone and licking a brush
among the tree's traces of changing shade.
The woman-I named her
and almost saw her-could be
flapping a pillowcase at the shutter
as though fanning a fire
that takes the frame by its walls.
Then, inside, a web-stitch quilt
pulls across a poster bed.
The house would be preparing
for wedding guests, Lacroix in the garden
spading a strawberry plant
to move the woolen roots.
Did Cezanne have nothing
to do with the people
he kept within the roof?-a flat red slant
marked by the slash of branches.
There is a close mess of buttered brushstrokes.
The house set back in dashes of leaves-
a perplexing green-guards a
shadow that could almost come
to memory, the window empty.


About This Poem
"When I lived in the Washington metropolitan area, I would find myself wandering through the (free!) National Gallery of Art on weekend afternoons and often gravitated toward one particular painting: Cezanne's 'House of Pere Lacroix.' I found myself inventing characters and a backstory for the painting, a story that went nowhere. I've moved a lot in my life, and I think the reason why I'm so drawn to the painting is that, for me, it invites the perspective of someone who is visiting a house you know intimately but can no longer enter."
-Tyler Mills

About Tyler Mills
Tyler Mills is the author of "Tongue Lyre" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Tyler Mills. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate