Letter to Claude Monet
“Monet is no more than an eye. But my God, what an eye!”
Paul Cézanne
I
How heavy the light is,
Like tired eyes,
Supporting so many colors,
So many shapes shifted from world to world.
Disaster was written from the start.
Only talent and reflexes
Let you survive so long.
You caught the light like a hunter, though
From minute to minute
From second to second
It changed colors.
You loved the world's outer skin.
You believed your own two eyes.
A haystack is a cathedral.
A cathedral is a dried leaf.
You saw them, after all.
II
The dimensions of your workshop
Significantly reduced your pictures.
I imagine how you work,
Painting without formats or frames.
And how you leave your workshop
For good...
III
Cruel as it may sound,
The blinder you got
The better your pictures.
Not seeing the particulars, you painted the general.
If your sickness had progressed,
You'd surely have discovered the abstract.
But as it happens,
The doctors helped one of your eyes,
restored its youth.
They were pleased, you were aghast.
One eye saw blues, the other browns,
One spring, the other fall,
One hope, the other doubts.
But if art is a hoax?
The more perfect the lie, the better it gets at the truth!
I know. You reject that in full.
IV
But on you painted.
You closed the old man's eye, and with the impatience of youth
Started fixing your recent pictures.
Others, you destroyed.
Your cleft soul strayed
In the world's flux, unsure of its body.
Do you recall?
What a relief to shut your eyes.
The smell of the leaves rotting in the pond was violet
With a touch of vermilion at the edges.