[New-Poetry] Monet Refuses the Operation

[JforJames at aol.com]

Monet Refuses the Operation 
 
Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in  Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an  affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision  of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges  you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does  not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of  being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of  parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors:  fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional  space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to  convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to  become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a  universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the  lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light  becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below  water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean  lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it  would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the  speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with  air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if  only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely  the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
 
    -- Lisel Mueller


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