[New-Poetry] Monet Refuses the Operation

[Bill Morgan]

Wow!  I hadn't seen this one.  Very nice.

At 04:53 PM 2/6/2007, you wrote:
>
>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
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20070206/e4093e53/attachment.html