A Poem for a Thursday #138

Lisel Mueller was a German-American poet who lived form 1924-2020. She was born in Hamburg, Germany and she and her family had to flee the Nazis when Mueller was 15. They immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Indiana. Her work “has been praised for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.”

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, and affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors:  fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you 
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe 
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another 
that it would take long, streaming hair 
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end. 

Monet Refuses the Operation
Lisel Mueller