Lisel Mueller Quotes

An Unanswered Question
If I had been the lone survivor
of my Tasmanian tribe,
the only person in the world
to speak my language
(as she was),
...and if among all those people
staring and pointing and laughing
and making their meaningless sounds
there had been one thoughtful face,
who might have instinctively understood
...the indispensable word
I must pass through the bars
...what word would it have been?

Heartland
When did we enter the heartless age? ...

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...

Moon Fishing
...And they fished till a traveler passed and said,
"Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water—
even the wiley moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads..."
And they fished...
..."Fools,
...You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks
...what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?"
And they fished...
..."Fools,
what good is the moon to a heartless man?
...get on your knees,
and drink as you never have,
...And they fished with their lips and tongues
until the water was gone
and the moon had slipped away
in the soft bottomless mud.

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...

The Blind Leading the Blind
Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.
The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever.
...You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from the palm,
love from the sweat of love, falling from flying.
...Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
...There are two of us here. Touch me.

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.

Happy and Unhappy Families II
In the play, we know what must happen
long before it happens,
and we call it a tragedy.
Here at home, this winter,
we have no name for it.

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.

A Prayer For Rain
...let love be brought to ignorance again.

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.

Letter from the End of the World
I started out as a girl
without a shadow, in iron shoes;
now, at the end of the world
I am a woman full of rain.
The journey back should be easy;
if this reaches you, wait for me.

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.

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.

Midwinter Notes
On my shelf of photographs
the dead have come to outnumber the living.
They stand like artificial flowers
among the real ones, so lifelike
even God might be fooled.
...Only after
our garden became a graveyard
...did the white stem rise
from the hermetic bulb,
...five lavender petals
...a brilliant contradiction,
out of phase, like an angel
strayed into Time, our world.