WHAT MONET MEANS TO ME NOW

 

This morning, the sunshine poured in at the kitchen window,

Polishing the yellow tomatoes you had put there for ripening, and

Piercing the blue glass vase I bought expressly for this,

To contain not liquid but light.

The colors reminded me of that room at Giverny,

Even though when we were there,

We couldn’t afford tickets for both house and garden,

So we chose the garden, looking cross-eyed at the lilies

On Monet’s pond

To make them look the way they do

In his paintings, and only later in the gift shop seeing

Pictures of his blue-and-yellow dining room

And so longing to see it that now,

Standing in a different house a continent away,

I can still remember it as though I had been there.

Paula Lalish