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 visi… - Lisel Mueller

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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.

English
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About Lisel Mueller

(born Elisabeth Neumann, February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the , Elmhurst College and . She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the in 1981 and the for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.

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Additional quotes by Lisel Mueller

Place and Time
...We're all pillars of salt.
...Where does the music come from
and where does it go when it's over—
the child's unanswered question
about more than music.
My mother is dead, and the piano
...burned with our city in World War II.
...it's still her black Bechstein
each concert pianist plays for me
and... her... fingers
are behind each virtuoso performance
on the stereo, giving me back
my prewar childhood city
intact and real.

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.

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