Vox Populi
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Lisel Mueller: Place and Time
History is your own heartbeat
— Michael Harper
Last night a man on the radio,
a still young man, said the business district
of his hometown had been plowed under.
The town was in North Dakota.
Grass, where the red-and-gold
Woolworth sign used to be,
where the revolving doors
took him inside Sears;
gone the sweaty seats
of the Roxy — or was it the Princess —
of countless Friday nights
that whipped his heart to a gallop
when a girl touched him, as the gun
on the screen flashed in the moonlight.
Grass, that egalitarian green,
pulling its sheet over rubble,
over his barely cold childhood,
on which he walks as others walk
over a buried Mayan temple
or a Roman aqueduct beneath
a remote sheep pasture
in the British Isles. Yet his voice,
the modest voice on the radio,
was almost apologetic,
as if to say, what’s one small town,
even if it is one’s own,
in an age of mass destruction,
and never mind the streets and stones
of a grown man’s childhood —
as if to say, the lives we live
before the present moment
are graves we walk away from.
Except we don’t. We’re all
pillars of salt. My life began
with Beethoven and Schubert
on my mother’s grand piano,
the shiny Bechstein on which she played
the famous symphonies
in piano reductions. But they were no
reductions for me, the child
who now remembers nothing
earlier than that music,
a weather I was born into,
a jubilant light or dusky sadness
struck up by my mother’s hands.
Where does music come from
and where does it go when it’s over —
the child’s unanswered question
about more than music.
My mother is dead, and the piano
she could not take with her into exile
burned with our city in World War II.
That is the half-truth. The other half
is that it’s still her black Bechstein
each concert pianist plays for me
and that her self-taught fingers
are behind each virtuoso performance
on the stereo, giving me back
my prewar childhood city
intact and real. I don’t know
if the man from North Dakota has
some music that brings back
his town to him, but something does,
and whatever he remembers
is durable and instantly
retrievable and lit
by a sky or streetlight
which does not change. That must be why
he sounded casual about
the mindless wreckage, clumsy
as an empty threat.
~~~~
From Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller (LSU, 1996). Included in Vox Populi for educational purposes only.
Lisel Mueller (born Elisabeth Neumann (1924 – 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.
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Thank you all. The perfect poems for today.
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Here’s another Lisel Mueller poem from her book Alive Together:
The Late News
For months, numbness
in the face of broadcasts;
I stick to my resolution
not to bleed
when my blood helps no one.
For months, I accept
my smooth skin,
my gratuitous life as my due;
then suddenly, a crack—
the truth seeps through like acid,
a child without eyes to weep with
weeps for me, and I bleed
as if I were still human.
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Anyone could write a poem like this—just not nearly so well. Thanks, VP, for bringing it back to mind. And thanks, Lisel.
Charles
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This poem has touched me profoundly. And everyone else has said it all already. “Where does music come from and where does it go when it’s over —”
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“The other half …”
How could we live without it and without those who remind us?
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She has always been SO damned good! That we hear little of her now (thanks for the resurrection, Mike!) is an object lesson in the fleetingness of fame.
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Mueller is and remains one of my true touch stones as a poet of truth and ache. I have often read and read aloud her poem that ends with the lines: “Something with wings went crazy against my chest once. There are two of us here. Touch me.”
And here today I add into my heart’s deep cave: “…as if to say, the lives we live before the present moment are graves we walk away from.”
Thank you for posting it, and for allowing me to hold the touchstone in this time of war and memories burning against one another.
“The Blind Leading the Blind” by Lisel Mueller
Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.
The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever.
The ground you walk on is rock. I have been here before.
People come here to be born, to discover, to kiss,
to dream, and to dig and to kill. Watch for the mud.
Summer blows in with scent of horses and roses;
fall with the sound of sound breaking; winter shoves
its empty sleeve down the dark of your throat.
You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from palm,
love from the sweat of love, falling from flying.
There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before.
Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
Once I stumbled on murder, the thin parts of a girl.
Walk on, keep walking, there are axes above us.
Watch for the occasional bits and bubbles of light —
Birthdays for you, recognitions: yourself, another.
Watch for the mud. Listen for bells, for beggars.
Something with wings went crazy against my chest once.
There are two of us here. Touch me.
____________
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I knew her a long time ago. It’s good to hear people are still reading her poems
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What a beautiful poem. I like the way it feels as though she is simply talking to me, or writing a letter. And her evocation of the radio meds, childhood, and her own. And “That is the half truth.” Last night, unable to sleep (maybe the “mindless wreckage” in the daily news), I did what she describes — went back to childhood places that were “durable and instantly/retrievable,” walked down a wooded road from long ago that is no longer there. There is something so kind and warm and wise in her voice.Thank you for this poem, this morning.
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Lisel Mueller’s poems in Alive Together were my first writing “teachers” and, if I could keep only one book of poetry from my shelves, it would be that one. I was very fortunate to attend one of Lisel’s last in-person readings (due to her fading eyesight), at the University of Michigan in 2000, and to become her friend. She would have been pleased to see this poem of hers featured at Vox Populi today, especially because Michael has paired it with an essay about the ACLU and freedom of speech. Over the years, Lisel and I often talked about politics, about history (and some of our similar family histories in Germany), and about poetry. Here is the link to her obituary in the NYT from February 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/books/lisel-mueller-dead.html.
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Wow–this poem reaches down into the sources of memory and heart and retrieves the lived life there and the jewel: “Where does it come/and where does it go….” right there, in the poem, recalling Faulkner’s “the past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” Thanks for retrieving this poem, Mike.
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