White, Blue

In intimate axes
of cerulean and white
dead trees foreground
an Everest in ice.

How tall runs that ridge?
Surely to Heaven
as its eye is on the Seine,
droves of magnate ice.

Freshness in an azure breath
blows the crispen wind
green and brown are vestiges
blue is the breeze and ice.

Treatises wonder:
where could the Sun be?
It is like the trees and wind,
blue and buried in ice.

Frankly all the coldness
arrests the warmth in me.
I feel blue and white,
another floe of ice.

Maybe I lie restless
on the bottom of the Seine
blue eyes wide and searching
their whiteness shines like ice.

Contemplating air on water
white in blue
drifting towards the surface
bubbles like depurposed ice.

Finally the colors seem lonely
blue craven for green or yellow
and white is nothing without black
--its hard to be happy, among so much ice.

Claude Monet "The Breakup of the Ice" 1880