(Monet, 1872)
Wallpaper in its embryonic state is
more finished than that seascape.
- Critic Louis Leroy
Here is where it all begins,
the harbor of La Havre,
Monet working quickly
in brush strokes short and loose,
the canvas layered thick
in waves of paint:
breaking through the morning fog
the sun, a little path of flames
flickering on water;
formless shadows growing bodies
turning into silhouettes
about to be small boats;
and all those distant hazy shapes
that put the world together:
steamboat smokestacks, masts,
factory chimneys, cranes
looming ghostly in the swirling
early morning mist.
This is what we would have seen
if we had been there with Monet
that moment of soleil levant
that morning in La Havre –
and this in fact is what we see
because we were. We are.