‘Private Eye’ by GTimothy Gordon’

Monet is only an eye. But what an eye!

-Cézanne-

How can you not adore exquisite eye candy
excess splashed over gardens, lilies of all hue,
ponds, rivers, the Seine, poplars, haystacks,
what’s before the eye and sense each moment,
and what’s behind bucolic farm, field, the poor
and privileged, transmuted by instinct and pigment
in audacious subtlety, more than meets the eye,
probing Nature’s quiddity, watchful waiting dawn-
to-dusk shadow and light past, passing, or to come
before gone, restoring garden myth, days of heaven,
lunches on l’herbe, ladies reading poetry propped up
against leafy green shadowy elm, swathed head-to-foot-
white, wisp of bundled snood, or Camille flaunting
spring parasols strolling with child flushed red poppy fields,
among endless Giverny gardens, lilies, hedgerows, naive
piquant images dreamt by sweatshop girls at redundant looms,
newsies hawking endless street copy, light failing them,
bourgeois us, brave new world sharp urban edges chronicling
moment, movement, absolute time by laboring clock, not sun,
moon, star, beguiling fog and mist, storm and squall and snow
etched with immanent insight, one’s self’s intuitive sense
of each moment seized aflash, élan vital unto chromantic ends
when the art line changed, cubists, surrealists, abstractionists,
constructionists, washed-out plein air watercolorists, divvying-up,
shriving, Nature’s carcass while half-blind, depressive, L’Orangerie
Water Lilies floral heft bloomed anew! girth, breadth, height,
that cold eye cast, romancing us ever and again back into color.

Author Bio:

Gordon’s DREAM WIND was published in 2020 (Spirit-of-the Ram), GROUND OF THIS BLUE EARTH (Mellen), while EVERYTHING SPEAKING CHINESE received the RIVERSTONE P Poetry Prize (AZ). His work appears in AGNI, American Literary R, Cincinnati PR, Mississippi R, New York Q, Phoebe, RHINO, Sonora R, Texas Observer, and several nominated for Pushcarts. EMPTY will be published in January 2024 (cybertwit), and BLUE BUSINESS is in progress. (58) He divides lives between borderland Chihuahuan Desert Southwest Organ Mountains and Asia.