In Green Harmony (poem)

                                                   --for Holly, and Pam, by the bay

                                 1

A latticed, green world and and water-lily light
     were but last year's dazzle of pink
limbs, a mere scarlet of passion afloat,
     awash, adrift and terribly undulant
              to these milk-dowsed eyes;

and Claude Monet watched it all, la nymphea,
     goat-tongued poet, and moon child one.


                                 2

Once, by Marin's redolently blue bay,
     a small boy heard the contentious gulls
skate eggshell skies, saw the distant buoys
     of men at work, felt the ineffable, keen pull,
              the wounded words of waves;

and the air could glimmer, then, as the diamond daze
     of fog dissolved into indeterminate day.


                                 3

And what child was it, upon Fuji's sacred loom,
     squatted beneath kitchen table, sensed in limbs,
such fragile limbs, earth and sky tumble, felt doom
     in  the rising sun, and shook to trees nimbly
             dancing?  Memory's dim room:

in amah's tow, riding the nickeling train where
     green waves of rye breathe still, en plein air.


                                 4

Yes, many decades since, when Monet surely knew
     the joy of this prismed light, saw the willow's
weeping green, a bed of flowers, its sinewed,
     power of scarlet and purple, its prolific yellow,
               the sky and its watery blue--

his blinded eyes now hang upon Chicago's walls,
     none the less for that, remembering it all.


                                  5

And you, poised upon the slopes of Big Sur,
     peering west into the next millennium,
what will you see to remember, what remember
     to see? what vision now innocent
              become your roseate blur,

more accurate than true?   In a green harmony,
     the mind sways easy on a widening sea.