National Poetry Month

[brigdh]

Also! Being April, it is National Poetry Month, and so I will be trying to post a poem a day. Here's your first:

Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos
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 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.

Comments

[synergic.livejournal.com]

I've been reading a lot of poetry on my flist this week, but this might just be my favorite.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Good poem! Excellent choice.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's beautiful. T_T (I'm actually crying)

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I cried too!

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Wow, I guess this was a good choice!

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

If you want to make us CRY!

(Yes, it was a good choice.)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you.

[b-hallward.livejournal.com]

Simply stunning. You really do have the most marvelous taste in poetry.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much.

[cellophane_ria.livejournal.com]

Stunning. Also, actually made me think about reading it as an artist, which sounds snobbish and silly, but was really thought-inspiring.

It's the third(?) year I got to read your April poetry entries, and it's like having a really good compilation book each year. Thank you.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

No, not snobbish at all. I'm glad it worked for you.

And awww. That means a lot to me.