Maybe There’s A Reason We Associate Wisdom With Age
I’m leaving the title off of this until the end–read it first.
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 dissolves
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.–Lisa Mueller
The title of the poem is (swipe to read): Monet Refuses The Operation
That’s the second time a Lisa Mueller poem has almost knocked me over by turning out, on closer inspection. to be very different than my first experience of it.
Kira
Richard B.
November 30th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
That is one gorgeous poem, Chris. I will (a) snitch it for my Other People’s Poetry collection and (b) track down more of this poet’s work.
Thanks!
December 1st, 2007 at 12:12 am
Hi Margo. Glad to see you here. I’m quite a fan of White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes–links for the benefit of other readers who don’t know why I’m going all fanboy here–and I keep an eye (well, an RSS reader) on Amid Among While. Hell, you’re in a bunch of posts here. </fanboy>
Anyway, the first Lisa Mueller I ran into was one called “In November”. Here, I’ll put the text in here:
That’s the one I was referring to above when I said “That’s the second time a Lisa Mueller poem has almost knocked me over by turning out, on closer inspection. to be very different than my first experience of it”.
The first time I read In November I hadn’t noticed the poet’s name and automatically assumed it was a man (for whatever reason, whatever that says about me). As you can imagine, the meaning of the entire poem–particularly the last bit, obviously, but the entire thing since the end bits send ripples of meaning back through the whole piece–is different if the speaker is a man or woman. When I noticed the author was a woman, then I changed my perspective to that of a female speaker, which changed the whole thing.
It was searching for more work after that which caused me to run into the poem in the post. I plan to search for more, for sure.
December 1st, 2007 at 12:23 am
Funny. I’d just gone and found ‘In November’ and decided I had to collect that one too. Hmm, she’s sounding buyable now.
‘Wisteria separate from the bridge’ was where I clicked it was Monet - I was very good and resisted the temptation to go straight to the end and check first.
I’m glad you’re a fan! All this poetry-collecting is work-avoiding on the novel. I’ll be glad to get back to short stories for a while.
December 1st, 2007 at 2:07 am
You did better than I did–it took me until the ‘lilies on water’ to notice what was happening. And I spent a lot of time at that big Monet exhibit the Art Institute of Chicago did back in the mid-90s, so I have no excuse. That was quite a show–over 150 pieces (including an entire room specially constructed to present the water lily paintings are a 360-degree panorama)!