Immortality In Sleeping Beauty's castle the clock strikes one hundred years and the girl in the tower returns to the world [unchanged]. ...fear persi… - Lisel Mueller

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.

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.

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