Heartland When did we enter the heartless age? ... - Lisel Mueller

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

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.

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.