I’m leaving the title off of this until the end–read it first.<\/p>\n
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
\naround the streetlights in Paris
\nand what I see is an aberration
\ncaused by old age, an affliction
\nI tell you it has taken me all my life
\nto arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
\nto soften and blur and finally banish
\nthe edges you regret I don’t see,
\nto learn that the line I called the horizon
\ndoes not exist and sky and water,
\nso long apart, are the same state of being.
\nFifty-four years before I could see
\nRouen cathedral is built
\nof parallel shafts of sun,
\nand now you want to restore
\nmy youthful errors: fixed
\nnotions of top and bottom,
\nthe illusion of three-dimensional space,
\nwisteria separate
\nfrom the bridge it covers.
\nWhat can I say to convince you
\nthe Houses of Parliament dissolves
\nnight after night to become
\nthe fluid dream of the Thames?
\nI will not return to a universe
\nof objects that don’t know each other,
\nas if islands were not the lost children
\nof one great continent. The world
\nis flux, and light becomes what it touches,
\nbecomes water, lilies on water,
\nabove and below water,
\nbecomes lilac and mauve and yellow
\nand white and cerulean lamps,
\nsmall fists passing sunlight
\nso quickly to one another
\nthat it would take long, streaming hair
\ninside my brush to catch it.
\nTo paint the speed of light!
\nOur weighted shapes, these verticals,
\nburn to mix with air
\nand change our bones, skin, clothes
\nto gases. Doctor,
\nif only you could see
\nhow heaven pulls earth into its arms
\nand how infinitely the heart expands
\nto claim this world, blue vapor without end.<\/p>\n–Lisa Mueller<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The title of the poem is (swipe to read): Monet Refuses The Operation<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[101,100,102],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-aging","tag-poetry","tag-wisdom","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-gH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}