C. Monet stood and stared at suns
And fires burned his eyes,
And purple pains flared up within
With other stuffs and dyes.
Promethean, he stole those flares
That pressed his lids with pains,
Then turned and burned the truth in paint
And captured twilight lanes
And empty seashores spread with dusk
Or sun-cold winter dawns,
And long-lost locomotive trains
That haunt ghost croquet lawns.
Or fields where fading flowers wait
For children to run by,
Then—same fields with the children slept
And summer set to die.
Lord! Monet painted emptiness!
But filled it with his soul;
His tiny touches? Giant treads.
Snow molecules? One whole!
Did frostbit windows teach his eyes
With blind December panes?
Or were his dazzle-fractured skies
A sunburst of migraines?
What knocked his brow or quaked his eye
To tilt the tints askew?
How from such fractured torturings
Confetti worlds, tossed, grew?
His splintered sight a blizzard is
Of pointillistic flakes,
But stepping back we, focussed, find
A burning sea, fire-lakes,
And what seemed multitudinous,
Molecular with flame,
Is Monet trapped and trimmed and fused
Within a summer frame.