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Kelly Sievers, CRNA

Contributor's Note

I am retired from KP after 27 years as a staff anesthetist. I would like to thank The Permanente Journal 
editors for their support and publication of my poems throughout the years.

When I encountered Monet’s Flood painting in Portland’s Art Museum I had to sit down on the long wooden bench in the room. My mother had recently died and here was grey and grey and turbulence. And so much water. My mother was a swimmer who swam a lifetime of lakes and bays in Wisconsin, water always welcoming her. Maybe it was the roiling loneliness of the painting’s water that led me to imagine my mother’s thoughts in her last hours. I compressed my musings into this poem. In the poem she falls into and out of reality and her life’s narrative, never at peace until she dives into her welcoming water.

Flood Solo

Poetry, Volume 2; Issue 1

-- after Monet’s “Flood, 1889”
-- for my mother, her last hours on 3/28/03

The sky told her it was coming.
Surely she had done something wrong—

an affair she dreamed true, cigarettes,
stolen from her father. What heartsick 
smoke she blew from Emmie’s attic,
skies promising everything.

She smelled dirt roiling. Waves swelled green, 
rocked black. Where was Jefferson Street, 
Emmie’s porch, bride’s spirea
blowing into her lap … nothing wrong?

Water rising, and her legs, always dependable, 
will not, cannot run. Look, the maple 
Madge planted in the front yard threatens
purple to brown in a tangled sky.

Now walls billow like sheets her mother 
pinned to summer winds. And her husband—
why does he want to boil her an egg, butter 
her toast? Something is wrong.

In the distance, a city. Its white lights 
roll toward her, radiant. She folds her spine. 
Water flows through her. The sky 
told her it was coming.

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