Chaïm Soutine: The Errant Road, 1939
as if a road could be otherwise but geometry
defies the man who is lost on the road that
the trees want to reach and reach down
to his walking on
along a verticality that defies
the requirements of normative perspective
and so he will reach, and the trees against chalk—
the gesture of the arm extended is central
to all Soutine’s work be it a branch or an ache
or a split of the face, going off. In this case
can you say that a man is lost just because
you cannot distinguish him from the background.
Copyright © 2016 by Cole Swensen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 22, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is from a series based on a decades-long fascination with the landscapes of the early twentieth-century painter Chaïm Soutine. The critic Clarisse Nicoïdski claimed that Soutine was the painter ‘who made the wind visible.’ This series tries to capture and continue Soutine’s synesthetic grasp of the world.”
—Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen was born in Kentfield, California, in 1955. She received her BA degree and MA from San Francisco State University, and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.