The thing about water lilies is, you have to trim the dead bits

quickly, so they don’t drown in their decay; which is why,

after he died, that pond that had been his pride and joy

became a swamp, a mud patch, then a dusty pit.

 

Of course I’d heard of him: I’d been to Charpentier’s rooms

to see his pictures there, thought them eccentric;

yet, somehow, he’d made it hard to see real blooms

anymore, except as products of his technique.

 

But to be honest, I don’t know why he asked for me.

By that time, there wasn’t a bookseller on the quays

who wasn’t hawking Hokusai out front on display

as if les Champs themselves had been inundated by that wave.

 

So when someone comes to tell me I’ve been summoned

from my morning coffee to head off for Normandy

I have to wonder — why me? — of so many he could have called upon

(and should have, had he been the sort to do things normally).

 

Our differences began from that first walk around:

he squinted into the morning haze while I studied the ground,

kicked at thin soil to loosen a stone,

tried to listen to the quiet, while he clowned

 

noisily for the children; but I noticed his tone

hardening when they went in.  The bridge has no

importance in itself, he said; it shares its essence

with water and flowers.  Then it was my turn.

 

A graceful arch and its reflection, I urged, would bestow

the garden with grace and teach, in visual form, lessons

about connection, about how one ought —

— he looked aghast:  You want me to paint a bridge? he rasped

 

not celebrate (opening his arms wide) all this? Back to the Salon?

The chemistry of water and colour, and, most of all, what light wrought:

that was his purpose; there was to be none other, nothing beyond

colourful banks and foliage; that was all he sought.

 

And so it went for days while we worked.  He’d have no truck                                           

with anything other than the view where he stood,

his perspective was all.  Truce.

So — discouraged, harried — I did what I could.

 

On my last day, for once the frogs stopped their castanets.

His eyes twinkled under that beret as I prepared to leave him.

Contrite, he clapped me on the shoulder; ‘I’ll bet’,

he said, ‘one day you’ll be as famous as me.’ And I believed him.

​

Oystercatcher Two, Robert Gray Prize for Poetry 2025, Five Islands Press