Monet Refuses The Operation by Lisel Mueller

One of my favorite paintings by Claude Monet is "Bridge Over Water Lilies".  Claude Monet is a founder of French Impressionist painting.  ("Impression, Sunrise" is a painting by Claude Monet which gave rise to the name of the Impressionist movement.)  I love his soft lines and pastel colors.

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Ever so often I stumble across this poem in an anthology, or I pick up my copy of "Alive Together" by Ms. Meuller and it always blows me away, this poem.  I have to insist that you buy this book.  And not just because it won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  It's just overflowing with mind-blowing, amazing poems.  Go ahead and find it at Amazon or your local book store and buy it.  I promise you, it will give you hours and hours of pure joy.  :-)

Love & Blessings,

~Marion~

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Monet Refuses the Operation
by Lisel Mueller

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 changes 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.

~from "Alive Together, New & Selected Poems"