poetry

National Poetry Month has passed me by, but on this final day I’ll take a moment to share an intriguing poem by Veronica Patterson, a local poet I used to work with. (I once gave Ronnie a Poetic License so that she could never be charged with practicing poetry without a license.) My Edward Hopper Eye, My Claude Monet was featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac in 2000.

My Edward Hopper Eye, My Claude Monet (Veronica Patterson)

I walk the streets at night
shutting first one eye, then the other.

The left eye is Hopper, its lens
too clear for comfort, the hard lines
of a town you’re stuck in, always
August, noon or midnight.

The right eye haloes each street lamp.
Threads of light dissolve each tree into
the next in Paris, spring,
dusk.

In Monet’s garden of well-tended horizons
I sleep three nights, then someone delivers
a newspaper. In the damp green air
events rub off on my hands.

In every storm
one eye watches bare light
shock the land, split a tree;
the other sees each gutter
alive with wings and the rain rinsing.

And so the eyes argue:
one strips, one clothes. One cauterizes,
one salves. And I
walk on.