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2006
Literary Art
Visual Art
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The Monet at the Getty (memory & migraine) for Margaret & Mel
J. T. Ledbetter
1. My migraine is as big as New Jersey,
and in the time it takes to write this poem
my eyes bulge like grapes popping on a hot vine!
2. Even in the dark I feel the shadows cool
your belly beneath the blue nightgown
undulating like water over the carpet.
I hide in the corner, ashamed of the growth
on my shoulders: it could be a monster melon,
or something from an island, forgotten by time,
a remnant of another age, grotesque, fulminating
like a fetid-wind ensemble.
3. (pain=3rd person)
Somewhere (where there are no headaches) lovers touch.
She shakes her head, her hair exploding in an aurora of softness
as she bangs his head on the pillow in a fit of beautiful exhaustion—
N.B. Children skate outside. Why? Why here?
4. (losing it)
Groveling in the miasmic mess of my pain,
I remember the Monet in the Getty, where the sinking sun rests
in unnatural beauty in puddles in the street where no one talks,
or walks along holding their heads; so I huddle in my closet
pretending I am just out of the frame, or already asleep
in this ugly little French village—
The silent-soled guard does not see me hiding in the painting,
glad for the silence, adrift in a landscape of snow, secure, safe
from the blinking lights and vice-grip of pain against my temples.
Someone may see me climbing a willow tree,
or bathing in an upstairs room—
this girl coming along in berkinstocks, taking notes,
peers over her granny glasses at the painting, wondering what it
might be like to live there, in another time . . .
she stops, imagining a face at a window—
thinks of calling the guard, or her professor who would smile
knowingly, and say: “Yes, Bernice, I would too…move on now . . .”
Yes, it’s me! Forget Professor Niddle. Because I’m in here where
neighbors can’t peer into my bedroom to see the madman rant
and rave, dancing naked on the bed,
refusing water and sex, ready for Cleveland, if that would help!
Laughing, pleading to be left in the painting, letting the sun go down
just beyond the town, feeling with it to the bottom of the world . . .
5. (sung softly to a tune of your choice)
My wife’s on the phone to the doctor man.
She soothes the brow, does all she can
to bring me back to the throbbing room
where comfort floats me into a womb
of silence and darkness where cooling hands
drift down my neck and back like sands
shifting, diaphanous, passing down my hips
as darkness falls across my chest like lips
parted, gentle as swallows in a Paris Park
where wings thrum in ecstasy, finding me
like a worm on a hot rock there in the dark.
6. (pills working)
feeling better, in the blue iris of early morning, I watch my dog pee
against the banana palm then, betraying a lyric imagination, scratch
her feet backward to throw her scent over the world (how I would
like to do that)
in another room my daughter stirs
her mirror still full of her beautiful face and hair
she has turned over in bed
she will miss 1st period again
downstairs the news blares over the tea kettle pluming the stove
I have lost more money in the stock market
smells waft (as they always seem to do no matter who is doing
the writing) upstairs as I curl my toes away from the cold floor
on the way to the bathroom
7. (later/a classroom sans any art/the usual suspects)
my freshmen notice my orange tie with white polka-dots
they feign interest in my good health
dimly aware I have become an exposed negative against the window
where the morning sun through the sycamores touches the water
with pinks and golds
I feel alive and well and in love with the swallow-touch
that lulled me back from a sweet madness
behind me students sway in light-shedding rows
their clothes voluble as water
and I feel even now his mysterious brush strokes across
my holy head as they chant Monet . . . Monet . . . Monet
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