The Man Who Wasn't Cézanne

It might have been Cézanne
who went into the field of corn
and setting up his easel,
looked around and saw
the mountains to the rear
and, argumentative in sky
and corn, the raucous crows.
It might have been Cézanne,
this painter on a mission --
and if it had been he
he would have known
where best to stay his eye. 
But this was not Cézanne. 
This painter was anonymous... 
famous but anonymous. He was
in need of time, reflection, 
thought. He needed to consider,
weigh up all the aspects. He 
had come to paint reality.
He'd paint it in whatever guise
it came to him. But where in
all this richness should
a painter focus first? To help
him in the awe-inspiring task
he'd brought an aid to mental
application: a chocolate cream egg.

He bites the egg.
It spurts. It stains
his shirt. But more:
it stains his pristine canvas.
He looks with horror at two stains --
a dark brown chocolate-coloured streak
beneath a yellow egg yolk smudge.

He takes a palette knife,
attacks the irritating marks,
but only spreads them, makes them
more offensive to his eyes.
He is about to try again
with greater fury when
a crow adds to the mess with
a grey-white and black, grey white
conglomerate obscenity... He stops,
the palette knife raised high
above his head in preparation for
the final strike... he's struck
by thought. And are these not,
he cries aloud, more real than
any marks I've ever seen purporting
to be art? Seconds after
voicing this epiphany he is engulfed
by midges, which he sets about
with vigour and his cap. Only later
does he realise that he has swatted some
on to the canvas, where they've
somehow morphed as crows among
the egg yolk-corn, above
the chocolate earth.

So that's reality! he says.
Reality impinges, bites, invades,
encroaches on your rights, becomes
a bloody nuisance now and then.
And if it don't do that, then man,
it just aint real enough for me!
Reality don't paint, it simply
spreads itself around. It's mucky,
fucky, unlucky for the guy
who gets too stuck with it. Reality
finds you and when it does,
then do all what you have to do with it --
and get out pretty quick! 

(Perhaps the world of art
would not have been the same
if anonymous had really been Cézanne!)