SPARK

Jennifer Fendya — Lake Zurich Pastoral

Inspiration

Ray Sharp

Response

Under the Garden Bridge

It’s a cygnet, she said,
when I called it a duckling,
and still I think it might become
a mallard, not a swan, but

here’s the thing about
art – it lives apart from time,
and one could even say
it’s not a bird in a pond

swimming over beer cans,
but just patterns of color
and light like Monet saw
blurred through double cataracts

and daubed on canvases
big as life. I thought of Monet
when I searched for images
of ducklings and learned that

they’re light enough to walk
on lily pads, which reminded me
of the paintings of Les Nymphéas
at Giverny which I saw displayed,

as the artist intended, all around
me on the walls of the two
specially constructed oval galleries
at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.

Look at the pattern of blue
and green, the way light dances
on the surface of the water
and imagine, as cygnet turns

to swan, every can becoming
a lily pad and every bottle
a fish that swims into its own life
and time beyond this view we share.

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