A Poem For a Thursday #196

Lisel Mueller was born in 1924 in Hamburg, Germany. She and her family were forced to flee from the Nazis when Mueller was 15. They settled in the United States. Mueller’s father was a professor at the University of Evansville which Mueller attended. She published a number of volumes of poetry, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her work as a translator was also widely respected. Mueller’s work “has been praised for its quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.”

The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our eglitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden 
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.

Romantics
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
Lisel Mueller