Rachel Dacus: “Grains of Monet”
GRAINS OF MONET
Grainstacks, Claude Monet, 1891.
He loved grains
of wheat and snow, particles
massed in brushstrokes
of insight that say the vast and opulent
universe is full of echoes, each leaf
mimicking its neighbors and
my eye seeing them, all parallels and panoplies
snowflakes, whitecaps, cloud flurries.
The sherbet glee painted into stalks and steeples,
a tree’s singularity beheld
with a fly’s complex eye,
sweeping the eons, putting every sun
in the Horsehead Nebula into the bristled
haystack. A sun-crisped field dancing
with a billion limbs and lingams,
a grass blade’s shaft
dividing each integer of being
to an eternal prime.
Rachel Dacus is the author of Gods of Water and Air, a collection of poetry, prose, and drama, and the poetry collections Earth Lessons and Femme au Chapeau. Her writing has appeared in Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, as well as in many other journals and anthologies, including Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English.