Sketchbook
They shared it, Cézanne drawing on the left-hand page,
his son on the right, though at times their lines crisscrossed
the same bright stretch of paper. The child drew trains or houses
that could have hung in my kitchen 20 years ago, and two men
standing wide-legged, one holding what might be a hunting gun,
the other raising an umbrella—or is it a parachute? The father
drew his boy, drew sun on a path winding through the trees,
the crests light-struck over the canopy. And his boy again.
What became of the much-loved son? There’s barely a trace
outside this sketchbook, so full of his marks. He kept the rest
of his life to himself and died quietly on his own; but unlike
my own son’s curled and yellowed scrawls, long lost, this boy’s
drawings live beside his father’s, beside his own round face
bent over the page as his father caught and preserved it.
Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. The 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 by Terrapin Books. Her poems, translations and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as The Common, Asymptote, Tupelo Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Rhino, Mayday and The Slowdown. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, and she is now working with Souad Labbize and Hélène Dorion on new translations. More information at www.susannalang.com.