Lisel Mueller Quotes

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 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.

What the Dog Perhaps Hears
...We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child...
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel...
whether in autum, when the trees
dry up... there isn't a shudder...
What is it like up there
For us...
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
... we heard nothing when the world changed.

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.

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...

January Afternoon,
With Billie Holiday
...The foolish old songs were right,
the heart does, actually, ache
from trying to push beyond
itself...
all that can be imagined;
space is not enough...
Desire has no object, it simply happens,
rises and floats, lighter than air—
but she knows that. ...
tomorrow is something she remembers.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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

A Holy Madness
To say thou to the sun
and call the wind brother;
to be humble before a grain of sand
and speak familiarly to the sea;
to preach to the birds in earnest
...o holy love, sweet lunacy,
which of us, seeing a child
exhorting a deaf robin,
does not bless that child
for the paradise in his head?
Be praised, my Lord, for Francis,
brother to lilies...

"O Brave New World,
That Hath Such People In It"
Soon you will be like her, 's daughter,
finding the door that leads out of yourself
...where you live with the gracious and light-footed creatures
that thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom.
...Soon you will
...banish yourself from the one flawless place.

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.