Only now do I see
in Monet’s painting of women
on the beach in Trouville,
the print we bought in Paris
just come from Trouville
where we walked past
the seafront pavilions
and I’d read you to sleep
in our room on the Rue Carnot,
the print I mailed home
in a tube I was given
by the close-cropped clerk
who brushed my hand,
called it un cadeau,
and you said I liked it,
said it again,
over morning rolls and Orangina,
and I teased you after
as we paced the museums,
closed the cafés, chafed
in the air of cheap rooms,
only now do I see
how the women look away,
bodies opposed,
how we mistook their angle
for languor, their silence
for ease, how only one
faces the sea,
but her gaze is bent
to a book or her lap,
it is hard to tell
that pillow of voile
from the wings of pages,
while the other turns
stiffly away from the sea
as if willing desire to rise
no higher than the laddered
chair she leans her long arm along,
girls in the clothes of women,
women in the clothes of girls,
their blue stripes and sashes,
identical saucers of flowers
atop black braids, their faces
going blank as I stare,
and I begin to think
it is not summer at all,
but winter, and black bobs
in the vanishing point
not bathers but boats turning back,
I begin to think
the one with the book is reading
aloud, steadily, intently,
over the din of surf
and low weather, the wind-wrapped
chatter and commonplaces
carried past them down the strand—
how they draw apart
from all that, one urging
the words they have smuggled away,
the other in the hold
of that voice,
looking fixedly at nothing
that is inside their frame,
where the full skirts swirl,
lift, converge.