Unreal city rising from the river and veiled in mist,
not Eliot’s grey and sickly-yellow urban desolation
rendered in sharp, black mechanically-struck words,
not Eliot’s vast, impersonal Thames-banked London at all,
but Monet’s Vetheuil, a village of pink, peach, and lavender
perched above a Seine of dappled blues and greens,
the town’s structures clustered as if drawn together
and upward by the tower of its church, the scene
not really even drawn but somehow brushed into being
without outline by human hand deftly dabbing paint,
reflection in the water no fainter than the upright
image that it mirrors with perfect imperfection,
a fairy city that might not be there at all.
Copyright 2014
T. Allen Culpepper
Poetry When It Comes 