Growing Up with Monet

Now and then I forget
the indescribable awe I felt,
at six, upon discovering
Monet?s water lilies
in a book.

Then it comes back to me,
what my teacher said.
He was going blind
when he painted them,
wearing specially-tinted glasses.

Something inside me
was shaken. I began to suspect
there are worlds apart from ours,
with wormhole-portals
scattered through our attics

and backyards.
Eyes behind eyes
that do the real seeing.
A shy but marvelous iris
at the epicenter of sleep.

Some things I learned in youth:
to make a statement true,
add an unremarkable if.
Explicate the assumptions;
assumptions fill the wells

from which we drink.
The eye is an aperture
embedded in a body.
At twenty, all I had
learned of the world

fit these definitions.
Dream is an act by which
the mind takes a stroll
around the neighborhood
as the body sleeps.

Betrayal, a thorn
concealed by petals.
Suffering, the length
of this thorn
and its sharpness.

Vanity, that by which
a bird measures the sky
with its body.
Courage, the attempt
of this bird.

Forgiveness, the notion
by which the blind
do not envy us our eyes.
The eye is an aperture
embedded in a body,

and the body expires. Monet,
like the whippoorwill
in a rhyme I called whimperwill,
from the age of six,
I have searched

for your nymphéas in life
and have found the world
in its vastness?such
immensity?radiant and
gorgeous and lacking.
Marie La Viña