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| Zack
Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of eighteen books
and plays, including six collections of poetry, a novel,
three anthologies, four volumes of translation, and a children’s
book. His most recent book of poems is The Number Before
Infinity, published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2008. He
has written three plays, including La Vie en Noir: The
Art and Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor, performed
by the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. He teaches in the MFA
in Writing Program at the California College of the Arts
and in the low-residency MFA in Writing at the University
of Alaska, Anchorage. He is the editor of a critically acclaimed
anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by
University of California Press; and editor of two volumes
of TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation, distributed by
University of Washington Press. His translations of George
Sand, Colette, and André Breton have won numerous
awards, including the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation
Award and the Northern California Book Award in Translation.
His children’s book, Oranges, was a Junior
Library Guild Book-of-the-Month.
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Email
Zack Rogow
at zrogow@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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