The Currency of His Light, by Roy Beckemeyer

Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), by Claude Monet (France) 1901

The Currency of His Light

"When I consider how my light is spent…"
— “On His Blindness,” by John Milton

To gamble away light the way Monet did,
to chase its furtive peregrinations, to allow
it to slither through smoke and fog, skid
along the undulations of the Thames’
snakeskin surface at dawn, to crucify
another new canvas every half hour
onto the easel, to watch his own sweat
drip like blood from a criminal’s nailed feet,
to dab pigments that capture light’s
spatterings on the lenticular lens of his eye,
the first inkling of sight’s failure: fog-within
drifting in counter-current to fog-without,
cigarette scorching lips, smoke trailing
a third stream of confusion across the view,
Houses of Parliament mere smears
of staid Gothic Revival outlines,
vergeboards and bargeboards lost to blur,
befogged, bedimmed, beclouded,
to lose the fractal infinity of detail,
the slabbed sameness of tiered arches
of limestone, to see as the hours advance
the kind of dissolution a hundred years
of acidic fog might wreak, to watch
stone become sun-molten: smoldering,
shifting, splodged, smirched, to map
color spaces with his LaPlacian brainstem,
to transform, to capture some small portion
of fleeting light and gradient hue,
transient as the stain and blotch of a man's
life on eon’s forever un-finite span, 
the canvases, leaning against the walls 
of every room, snatched up in succession 
to replicate yesterday’s angle of sun and curl 
of smoke, the artist minting each with die 
and press: planchet after planchet struck again
and again, coined by eye and hand
and light’s merciless vicissitudes.

Roy Beckemeyer

Roy Beckemeyer's latest poetry book is Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019).