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.

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