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Estately Such determined beauty could make you want a train station’s exhaust and noise. After the Monet estate’s lily ponds, home is a Los Angeles freeway, chain-linked for twenty miles, overpass tattooed like a biker’s arm. Give me Carnaval, Boulevard des Capucines. Such prettiness and order can cause despair, but painters leave no place for curling up in pillows, no lap throw to call your own. Artists have it all their way, the world shrunken into their fauve television, love a smear of blended colors on palettes, child’s thumbprints you leave on the canvas when you have no other ideas and a rag isn’t handy. Monet’s gardens shone because the morning gardener boated around the pond to clean train soot from the water lilies before the master went out in his boat to find the lilies, each skirt flounced flat on the water, mist drifted just apart, ready as white-stockinged thighs. Rachel Dacus’s poetry collections are Another Circle of Delight, Femme au chapeau, and Earth Lessons. Her work appears in the anthologies Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press), Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press), and Letters to the World: Poetry from the Women in Poetry Listserv (Red Hen Press). |
