The Age of the Empty Chair

The Age of the Empty Chair

The Age of the Empty Chair

In Monet’s The Beach at Trouville, it is week one of the
                                                                                                Franco-Prussian war.
The chair lodges in the sand between two women. One reads, the
                                                                                                                           other

points her face at the emptying beach. The chair belongs to no one,
it is a found chair, a trouvaille, and there is never one chair too many

but one sitter too few. A flag rigid on its pole indicates
a swelling in the air, or something stronger, and the rent waves,

delicate turmoils of spume and lace, are distant cousins of the
                                                                                                                      revolution
bound into the ebb and flow it breaks free of, then breaks back into. 

There is sand in the paint; the place is mixed into its making
and even the brushstrokes replicate the water’s peaks as they take

the light: roofs pell-mell across a city skyline, flashpoints in the sun.
The chair suggests all that can be suggested about change, but it
                                                                                                                           remains

apart from it: the way a sail suggests the wind, the way a shell holds
a recording of the waves even as the waves turn around it.