Margot Wizansky: “Monet’s Water Lilies”
MONET’S WATER LILIES
L‘Orangerie, Paris
Disoriented, I’m floating with water lilies—
the galleries shaped like elongated eggs—
and reflections of clouds heavy with sunlight,
leaves barely held by the surface of water,
moving almost imperceptibly, as if the depths
hold some other mystery, perhaps
a nymph dying of love in the trailing
willows, an expanse with no beginning,
no shoreline, tender shades of grief,
succor of sunrise in orange and rose
on the eastern side, the setting sun opposite,
panels conceived while Monet, his sight failing,
mourned his son, beset by insurmountable
doubts as he worked and reworked for decades,
even destroying the ones that dissatisfied him,
painting sometimes to the crack of distant guns,
and after, his canvases had no beginning or end,
this memorial to the Great War to heal French souls,
painting the way battles erased time and space
and borders, laboring in plein air or in his studio
suffused with light and when the final panorama
was installed, the colors resonated with whatever
weather shone through the glass ceiling,
a Sistine Chapel of Impressionism, no focal points,
only atmosphere, only soft abstraction.
Margot Wizansky’s chapbook, Wild for Life, was published with Lily Poetry Review Books (2022). The Yellow Sweater, her full-length poetry collection, is available from Kelsay Press (2023). Wizansky’s poems have appeared online and in many journals such as American Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Ruminate, River Styx, Cimarron, and elsewhere. She edited anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains.