artwork: katsushika hokusai (the metropolitan museum of art)
Giverny
by Martha
Kaplan
The gardens
beautiful without a doubt
and so the
crowds throng
passing
through the not quite Japanese garden
along the path
and over the bridge,
pausing there
to gaze long at the water lilies,
imagining
those icons made famous
by the
painter’s hands, they contemplate the color
of sky and
clouds shimmering in the pond,
they move then
through the shadowed trees,
along the
cindered path opening bright and wide
into the
cottage gardens, full floral, with
lavender
borders, hollyhocks in high
color, roses
everywhere on green lattices,
momentarily,
they sit, benched, by the borders,
holding
guidebooks,
or huddled on
the steps, journaling.
Rested, they
pass into the pink house framed in green
shutters, ivy
and white roses climbing its walls,
they shoulder
from room to room
peering
closely at imitations
of the great
painter’s works:
crowds of
French, crowds of Americans,
crowds of
Germans, Italians, Greeks, Czechs, and Yugoslavs
British,
Spanish, Scots, Belgians, and Dutch,
Latinos and
Latinas, even Solomon Islanders, and Japanese
flowers of all
sorts pass through the blue
and yellow
kitchen, the bedrooms, and windowed study,
they celebrate
the house, examining every detail,
and yet they
fail to pause for the art that moved the painter’s eye,
an
inspiration, the clearest lines and the bluest blues on every wall:
The Wave, A
Thousand Views Along the Tokaido
Road
still slightly
creased, as if just lifted from the packing boxes
of precious
porcelain.
~ first
published in Mobius, The Poetry Magazine
