It’s only a mark on the calendar,
wobble of imperfect time, this un-anniversary,
yearly turning despite our untimely end.
Instead of annus horribilus, I’ll remember

the day you said Close your eyes, driving
out in east Knox County. I opened to a mural,
a painting was all I could think—Monet’s
Poppies at Argenteuil—but not poppies,

daylilies—and I the hatted woman
with bluish umbrella, my skirt a flourish
in the swaying fields of Oakes Daylily Farm.
This day I offered to the blinding original

in le Musée d’Orsay, my pilgrimage
to the art of aloneness. Gift I open
all wrapped and bowed, even now,
twenty years later, bowing to an instant

of caught breath instead of its slow suffocation.
Monet lived seven years in Argenteuil,
en plein-air shimmer of meadow and summer,
the coquelicots a step toward the abstract.

My imagined future, planted on my knees,
still bends to the wind—the buttery Mary Todd,
Happy Returns, spider lilies aglow at dusk.
So like grace and memory that, despite

a spring visitation of rust, fungus
that cripples and yellows down the vein
of leaf, that day trumpets fullhearted
instead.

©

Linda Parsons is the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and reviews editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. She coordinates WordStream, WDVX-FM’s weekly reading/performance series, with Stellasue Lee, and is copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. Widely published, her fifth poetry collection is Candescent (Iris Press, 2019).