I am in love with big horizons, that wonderful sense of space, that place where sky meets land or water.
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| South shore of the St. Laurence River |
A friend, [thanks so much Raechel] send me this poem, a wonderful accompaniment to the photo.
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 ~
(Sixty Years
of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)
