I’ve carried in my heart
the image of a tree—
The Almond Tree in Blossom, the last thing
Pierre Bonnard would ever paint,
a small moment of grace
the eighty-year-old artist, frail with loss,
set down before his death.
In his last days Bonnard,
too ill to hold the brush, asked his nephew
to change a patch of green to orange for him
below the almond tree, with a little yellow,
because the green wasn’t quite right.
One of Bonnard’s biographers has said
it is one of the most intensely poetic
pictures of the last century, the artist’s
hymn to joy sung in deep solitude.
Whenever I’ve been worn down by the world
I think about that tree
outside the artist’s bedroom window
in the south of France, outside
the austere cell where he lay in his solitary bed
with no strength left, watching for death
but seeing only how
a stroke or two of yellow
could make everything come right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christie B. Cochrell loves the play of light, the journeyings of time, things ephemeral and ancient. Her work has been published by Tin House, New Letters, Red Bird Chapbooks and Figroot Press among others, and has won several awards including the Dorothy Cappon Prize for the Essay and the Literal Latté Short Short Contest. Her short story “The Pinecone” received Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train March/April 2016 Very Short Fiction contest. Once New Mexico Young Poet of the Year, in Santa Fe, she now lives and writes by the ocean in Santa Cruz, California.