Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller
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 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.
This poem about the different ways of seeing into an interconnected world, the wisdom to soften the edges of the world, to marvel at the colors, to see how things actually relate than the ways our minds like to sort and categorize and make things have crisp boundaries that don’t actually exist. There’s a feminism in the claim a quiet feminist that the softening and blurring the world calls deficit (in late life, in women, in those whose perception does not stay within prescribed lines) may in fact be the clearer seeing.
This poem is from Second Language (Louisiana State University Press, 1986), later collected in her Pulitzer-winning Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996). Lisel Mueller (1924–2020) was German-born, fled Nazi Germany with her family at fifteen, learned English as her second language (the title of the book is its own claim), and went on to win a Pulitzer when she was seventy-two.
