Lisel Mueller Quotes

A Grackle Observed
Watching the black grackle
come out...
into the sun, I am dazzled
by an unsuspected sheen,
yellow, purple and green,
...until he, unaware
of what he means...
hops back...
and leaves the shining part
...behind, as though
brightness must outgrow
its... worldly dress
and enter the mind...
as vision... pure light.

Pigeons
...Once they were elegant, carefree;
they called to each other in rich, deep voices,
and we called them doves
and welcomed them to our gardens.

Tears
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at the glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
...Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body.

Messages
...Dogs talk to us with their bodies
and accept our answers in words.
Holes ask for rain; the stunted corpse of an elm
is revealed as a sign. We keep breaking
the code of the dead, we reply.

On Finding a Bird's Bones in the Woods
Even Einstein, gazing
at the slender ribs of the world,
...even he, unlearning
the bag and baggage of notion,
must have kept some shred
in which to clothe that shape,
as we, who cannot escape
...swaddle
this tiny world of bone
in all that we have known...

In Passing
How swiftly...
...as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Imaginary Paintings
6 How Would I Paint the Big Lie
<small>Smooth, and deceptively small
so that it can be swallowed
like something we take for a cold.
...sweet and glossy,
that pleases the tongue
and goes down easy,
never mind
the poison inside.</small>
7 How Would I Paint Nostalgia
<small>...A radiant bride in white
standing above a waterfall,
watching the water rush
away...</small>

In The Rag And
Bone Shop
Trade me, shopkeeper Yeats,
one filthy rag, one bone
that can make poetry
for all the jeweled bits.
...A rag to light a fire,
a bone to whistle on!
Proprietary, proud...

Immortality
In Sleeping Beauty's castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world [unchanged].
...fear persists, and...
the anger that causes fear persists,
...its trajectory can't be changed
or broken, only interrupted.

Alive Together
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you...
I might have been...
a woman without a name
weeping in Master's bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
...I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. ...
...I might have been you.
...The odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists with square hats
and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who—but for endless ifs—
might have missed out...

On Reading An Anthology of Postwar German Poetry
America saved me
...I was not crushed
under rubble, nor was I beaten
along a frozen highway;
my children are not dead
of postwar hunger;
...I have forced no one
into a chamber of death.
...I know enough to refuse to say
that life is good,
but I act as though it were,
and skeptical about love, I survive
by the witness of my own.

The Biographer
I came to live in your house
restored your pictures, brought back your books,
discovered the key to your desk,
moved the yellow chair to the window—
and now you come in, asking
whose house this is.

Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
...it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of... lamps as angels,
to soften... blur and finally banish
the edges...
to learn that... the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
...apart, the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral... built
of... shafts of sun
and now you want...
...youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
...wisteria separate
from the bridge...
Houses of Parliament [that do not] dissolve
...to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
...The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
...so quickly...
it would take...
...my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
...shapes, these ...
burn to...
change our bones...
to gases.
how heaven pulls earth...
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

The Levitation
...Whatever exists is floating:
words without weight, bodies without resistance,
feelings wavy as trailing scarves
move through the gently dissolving center
between heaven and earth where we live,
briefly, in a mild light.

A Nude by Edward Hopper
...this body
is home, my childhood
is buried here, my sleep
rises and sets inside,
desire
crested and wore itself thin
between these bones—
I live here.