The Song of the Practical
       

Increasingly, those water lilies of Claude Monet's
became unbodied—were yolk, and mist, and cream
and primal amniotic murk, a swirly haze
of rapturous seeing: "a dream
of infinity," one critic accurately said.
But even a dream is rooted
in the physical—in a brain, in a head
that's also suited
for actuarial tables, for the vision
of lawyer s, accountants, hatchet CEOs.
My wife and I once saw a magician
rise from the stage and—who knows
how?—float over the wide-eyed audience,
lighter than meringue, without
mirrors or wires or smoke, a sense-
confounding moment, a mahout
without an elephant beneath. And still,
although the ushers sat us
directly below a seeming miracle,
we knew that it required apparatus,
strategic planning, expense—there had to be
attention paid to the practical, the daily grind,
the union wages, the catering truck, the heavy
shlepping of roadies—behind
that moment of weightless wonder. Monet
"once summoned the local barber to cut his hair"
while he painted, while he continued his day
of communing with spirit and cosmos and air.

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Copyright © 2018 Albert Goldbarth All rights reserved
from Boulevard
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission