‘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.

Anyway, the first Lisa Mueller I ran into was one called “In November”. Here, I’ll put the text in here:

In November
by Lisa Mueller

Outside the house the wind is howling
and the trees are creaking horribly.
This is an old story
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room.
You have already made the coffee
and the radio brings us music
from a confident age. In the paper
bad news is set in distant places.
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

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.

Thanks!