Women in the Garden

after Claude Monet, oil on canvas, 1866

after René (1978–2021)

What is alive between us?

I am asking with my mouth

                                                to the woman in the white dress

who is running away. Arms outstretched, 

as if to flee, or greet someone unseen, left of frame. My subject is 

loneliness.

                                                *

My subject is the woman in the white dress 

who is running away. Mostly, I am ashamed and amazed.

I am looking at the painting to save my eyes.

                                                *

The women are dead but can be spoken to. 

What ended you? What ended you?

A knife, the whiteness of the flowers. Heinrich writes,

“It may be that Women in the Garden revealed Monet’s subject to him

 for the first time: light.”   

                                                *

The goal of the painting is to see through the painting. 

The goal of the painting is to feel your eyes. 

I am touching the strange bouquet of the mind, 

of her suicide. “Sunlight,” Heinrich writes, 

“spread like a great towel on the path.”  

                                                *

The woman in the white dress is still 

running away. Camille Monet posed

for each woman, as I do. As I do. How they all 

died, and I don’t have anywhere to see you.  

*

“She seems frozen in her poses,” Henrich writes, and yes, they make no sense.

(I will unbutton you in the dark, come apart in your mouth, 

a light nearing honey.) Heinrich writes, “The women

do not seem part of the natural scene.” Yes, I am 

unnatural here, too. 

                                                *

They have come to the garden to take their lives.

Maybe the woman in white is running away to hide 

behind the trees. Maybe she wants privacy. I apologize.

I am closing my eyes. 

                                                *

Goodbye, light pouring through the mind.

Song of violence, and the sounds 

that would rather be silence. “For me, the subject

is of secondary importance,” Monet wrote.

“I want to convey what is alive 

between me and the subject.”

*

I have come to the garden to say goodbye.

To kneel before my subject. Yes,  

I am taking off my dress to mean tenderness.

What is alive between us.

ξ

Allison Benis White is the author of The Wendys (Four Way Books 2020), Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the CSU Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.