Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.
Lisel Mueller: Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an 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.
~~~~
Copyright 1996 Lisel Mueller. From Alive Together: New and Selected Poems, Louisiana State University Press (1996).
Winner of the 2002 Ruth Lilly Prize given by Poetry magazine and a founding member of the Poetry Center of Chicago, Lisel Mueller was the author of seven volumes of poems: Alive Together, winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The Need to Hold Still, awarded the 1981 National Book Award for Poetry; Waving from Shore, recipient of a 1990 Carl Sandburg Award; The Private Life, the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and three other volumes.
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Splendid poem.
LikeLike
“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.” I have arrived at this point of a new way of seeing, and Lisel Mueller’s poem is ‘giving me permission’ to perceive the world in flux. I have seen how ‘heaven pulls earth (and all who sail in her) into its arms.
Happy first day of autumn (for me, at the other side of the world).
LikeLike
This radiant poem and H.C. Palmer’s essay — what treasures you offer us, Michael!
LikeLike
Today as I sat down for daily meditation, a squirrel arrived at the feeder. Once I had settled in, I looked out the window to see its sharp eyes checking me to see if I would suddenly attack. Meditation hijacked, my eyes kept opening to see her munching and watching, but oh her glorious tail caught the morning sun from below the feeder, shimmered, seemed to glow, until the gong on my app signaled the end of my sit and she disappeared over the roof. The sun is still painting the oranges in the tree, the feeder is still swaying, and two finches have landed to see what is left. For a moment I could be in the present moment. Was it Lothlorian where evil could not penetrate?
This is how a poem can set off a whole avalanche of seeing. This is why I read VP. This is why I am grateful for poetry and for Michael who often seems to anticipate what is needed. Now I will return my gaze to the garden, orange globes echoed by bird of paradise blooms, pines whose scent will add another layer of seeing as the heat of day arrives.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Lovely prose poem, Barb. I’m so glad you are part of this conversation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Beautiful ❤️
LikeLike
I have loved this poem since I first read it and my appreciation grows with each new reading. It gives me a hopeful, new perspective when my vision grows cloudy, though I cannot imagine finding such words to describe how ‘heaven pulls earth into its arms’. Thank heaven for Lisel Mueller.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, thank heaven for the poets. They keep me sane in this hellish time.
LikeLike
To paint the speed of light.
Monet Refuses the Operation is a marvelous poem on so many levels. Glancing through Mueller’s book, Alive Together, light, in all its ways, appears to have been a major theme of Mueller’s work. Her earlier poem, A Grackle Observed (1965) concludes:
brightness must outgrow
its fluttering worldly dress
and enter the mind outright
as vision, as pure light.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Beautiful, Jim. Just beautiful.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Monet saw perfectly as does Mueller, in this poem.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yes, they are a good pairing, aren’t they?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I never know which of Mueller’s poems to love the most. today, this aberrant cruel spring…let it be this one, and let it be strange and haloed…. and may my eyes see with hers…and his!
LikeLiked by 4 people
Hear, hear!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Christine, more than any of us, you have carried Mueller’s legacy.
LikeLiked by 2 people
A beautiful comment, Margo. You have such a gift!
LikeLiked by 2 people