a few summers ago i went to the boston museum of fine art.
i was looking at "haystack" by monet and squinting my eyes.



monet, 1890.


i don't know, it just struck me.
a piercing blade of light right into my heart.
my whole body had an obsessive tremor
and i couldn't stop smiling and laughing,
like someone whispered in my ear.

i grew up around art but not in an academic way.
up until college, i understood it to be a kind of
emotional passion you could carve into a tool or a weapon.

i guess i hadn't fully internalized the idea that you could
materialize your relationship to color and by extension,
your relation to light.

i wrote two short essays
it lead me down this whole
network of thinking,
and that year
i thought about painting more than i painted...