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| Zack
Rogow's fifth book of poems, Greatest Hits: 1979-2001,
was published in 2002 by Pudding House Publications. His previous
collections of poetry include The Selfsame Planet
from Mayapple Press, and A Preview of the Dream from
Gull Books. He is the editor of a new anthology of U.S. poetry,
The Face of Poetry, to be published by University
of California Press in 2005. Poems of his have appeared in
a wide range of magazines, from the American Poetry Review
to Switched-on Gutenberg on the World Wide Web. He translates
French literature and was a co-winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month
Club Translation Award for Earthlight by André Breton
and winner of a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (BABRA) for
his translation of George Sand's novel, Horace. His
essays and reviews have been published in The New York
Times Book Review, AWP Writer's Chronicle, The San Francisco
Chronicle, Poets & Writers Magazine, and other publications.
At the University of California, Berkeley he coordinates the
Lunch Poems Reading Series. He teaches in the MFA in Writing
Program at the California College of the Arts.
See
next poem:
Email
Zack Rogow
at zrogow@uclink.berkeley.edu
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Monet’s
Final Bloom: Giverny
Gone
the canvasses of locomotives
with headlights drilling into the snow;
no more ice floes on the Seine
cracking like a gun battle;
no summer sky so blue it wobbled,
or Paris streets drenched
with holiday flags; gone the years
so restless he hesitated
to enter his own threshold;
no more beauty in white
shouldering her parasol at the green crest of the hill
while the sun ached in the young painter’s head.
Suddenly
the sky was just reflection.
His blue leaned toward violet.
Headlights had cooled into pale blooms,
and noontime was thinning to opal.
Flags unravelled into ropes
of willows, sweeping his pond,
and the woman in white--
cancer at 32. Even the one Monet had cheated
her for, his own friend’s wife--
she was gone. The children all tall
and gone.
Then
came the decades
of peering deeper and deeper
into the water garden,
past lily pads teased up
by the wind, the painter squinting
to glimpse a sequin of his destination.
The old man in his sun hat
and long beard of shredded light
kept his easel company
by the moon bridge
as she surveyed his garden.
He called it his true masterpiece.
Before he could die he had to learn
this strange flower
that dwelled in liquid
but rooted own
into its home.
Copyright
® Zack Rogow.
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