My mother loved Claude Monet.
But then she loved everything French—
tout ca—and wanted me to love it, too.
But I didn’t love French. Madame Pearl
dropped her r’s in high school and I couldn’t
stop laughing. She told me to leave, sortez,
which sounded like sautez. So I jumped
like a frog out the door and down the hall,
laughing all the way to the principal’s office.
Those water lilies were everywhere
on the walls in our house. My mother
loved them. But they gave me the impression
of an army of invisible bullfrogs going
ribbit, ribbit. I think everything is interesting
if you’re of a mind to see it in that light.
Claude Monet probably understood this
as he sat by his wife’s deathbed, transfixed
by that light playing on her dead face.
The stoners in my high school definitely
understood that everything is intoxicatingly
interesting if you’re of a mind to see it
in that light. And then there was my grandmother
in her hospital bed, liver spots and moles
speckling her wrinkled face and neck
which made her look like a toad beneath
the white sheets. Surrounded by doctors
and nurses and children and grandchildren—
she was of a mind to see the pulse oximeter
that they’d placed on her left index finger
as the most interesting thing in the room,
more interesting than anything else in recent
memory, which was mostly gone by then
anyway. She cocked her head like a bird
or a philosopher contemplating a crumb
on God’s table under the light—that light—
and said to her children and grandchildren
and all of the strangers working together
to keep her from dying: “What is the name
of this thing? It’s so interesting. I don’t think
I’ve ever seen one before in my life.”
Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He has kept his day job all these years just in case the poetry thing didn’t work out. He has always liked what Marianne Moore said about poetry: “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”