Competition Nineteen Shortlisted: Cubism by Leonard Kress
******Barnegat Lighthouse, Long Beach Island, the Atlantic Ocean, weekend in late August. Daniel here among us, the last time we’d all be together. Dead now–lung cancer, Parkinson’s, dementia. After a day trudging through dunes, entangled in dune grass, lugging paint, easels, and stretched canvas, longwinded disputes: Cezanne or Matisse? We are flopped on the floor of our rented bungalow—this place, we’ve chosen to paint the dunes in changing light. Tomorrow everything will transform. Then what will become of the black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk of air, or the young gull vomiting crab entrails? I catch him glancing tenderly at my nursing baby daughter, the catalog from the recent Cezanne show brushing against her chubby thighs. We are looking at A view of Mount Saint Victoire, all the Cezanne-stops pulled out, the landscape reduced to essential shapes—cubes, cylinders, spheres, planes of color, an immense panorama, receding without resorting to tricks of illusion and math, the mountaintop, and every possible point-of-view. Daniel has just turned forty. We debate the First Noble Truth, its reminder that all life is suffering. Out of joint. Later, I watch him, spectral and skeletal, down glass after glass of vodka. In the morning, he emerges, holding two slices of bread, one in each hand, one coated with peanut butter, the other with jam. Noticing us, he holds them apart for a few seconds, then presses them together–the Buddhist gesture for the reconciliation of opposites.
Leonard Kress has published poetry, translations, non-fiction, and fiction in Missouri Review, Tupelo, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has received multiple grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council and currently teaches at Temple University.
Photo courtesy of Mania Dajnak
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