Tonight, to save myself from exhaustion (and how can you be exhausted, one might reasonably question, when you are not teaching, as your students are away on the camping trip you are supposed to be on? to which my answer can only be a guess: that the infection my body is fighting somewhere in the region of my bronchial tubes is taking more from me than I care to realize), I am going to bed early and without writing anything (or much of anything) here.
Instead I am copying a poem, and it is a beautiful poem, sent to me by my Very New and Exciting friend Lisa. Enjoy it, do.
But let me first say that it is very windy here, and has been all day (which makes me think, of course, of my dear students and colleagues who are camping without me and suffering without me the threat of inclement weather). The wind is angels, don’t you know. Sometimes I can nearly see them, and sometimes I Just Can’t. Today the thoughts that come and come and come seem to mean that I am not seeing the angels at all. No. Not at all.
And what, one wonders, is the remedy for such blindness? Because I know better. I know it is angels; I know they are there. But today, I am afraid to say, all I can see is bending branch and swaying trunk, the silver backs of leaves.
Monet Refuses The Operation
Doctor, you say 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 change 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.
-Liesel Mueller
