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