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,
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.
Poem via Dragonfly's Poetry and Prolixity
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