Chasing After Monet's Ghosts

Chasing After Monet’s Ghosts

And so.

I go out among them in all

mists of light or dim

                (even if I never leave

                our house for want

                or can’t) spreading

the blanket

in the best

I- can- lie- down- on

and- talk- about- it- ground:

the Jesus moments of my day,

                how coming up

                to the dammed

                pond when it was all blossom

                and Monet, every pad and lily

                lifting and lowering in the wind like a Palm Sunday venerate,

thinking how

                if I were more

                trusting than the apostle Peter

                I could’ve walked on it all but never need to

                not touch sniff or lick

                                the water or the marsh bird’s dart, --or

                                coming on the kill site later (because this reminds me)

                                of a scattering of blue jay feathers

                                and collecting them one after the other

                                smoothing them against the broken shaft

                                after their chaos of letting off (what led it?) the wing

                                or breast, collecting them with that mix

                                of grief and gladness we’re supposed

                                to get when something is fed,

                                when what’s left is the scrapped pallet

                                of a god coming on

                                through the brush of a hard packed path

                                just to see who

                                would notice.  Beaver.  Maybe

                                we see them, or think we do, and the roads

                                their noses make when they take to

                                the water above their lodge

                                how naturally all the lilies part

                                maybe for good if the wind, if the current,

                                if the root to the pond floor is pulled loose...

I think just at this moment it’s all about old scrapes

of beavers near the lilies and stubs

of trees all lean and quiet in their rot

in the water, how simple it is

                here on solid ground

                and mud in some spots

                I slough through

                to bring home on the bottom

                of my shoes, shoes I kick off

                absently, thinking nothing of

                that mud being the last scene

                or the first

                of some lovers kiss or fist

                or how that jay may have gone down

                in hawk sound while the beaver glided through,

                that absent beaver and the long dead

                Monet who would’ve walked  

                in a place like this and wet his lips

                and glide his hand across the bodice

    of his cloth and been suspended on the water

    it would become, and he

                never would have sunk

                but instead slipped his fingers in

                to the mud and rested them there against the hinges

                of the lilies, kept them

                until they were drawn and puckered

                only pulling them out unwillingly

                and only after they were up to the cuff in cold

                revolt and rancid muck and slime.