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  • Giverny
  • Callie Siskel (bio)

“Nature never stops”—Claude Monet

There’s nothing in the garden as yellow as the dining room. Nothing as opaque.

A single buttery shade covers the walls and closes around the furniture.

Two lengths of rope tie the room off from the house as though warning of wet paint.

It’s lacquer and sunlight through the patio doors that give the illusion of liquid

where there’s none, where everything is set. Even the yellow table,

draped in white and the eight cane-back chairs, each one pushed in

to a willowware plate and a crystal glass we couldn’t raise.

You were my father for nearly thirteen years. I asked you why [End Page 42]

we weren’t allowed to touch anything that day, but you could not have known

the room would go unchanged, and we would be outlasted by a heavy coat of paint. [End Page 43]

Callie Siskel

Callie Siskel teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Criterion, Able Muse, Passages North, and Tar River Poetry.

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