The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Thu 5/4/06)

[RetroLounge]

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 dissolves
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.

Lisel Mueller

********************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[Random_Australian]

1. Nice poem.

[miss_american_pie]

2. My favorite of hers:

A Day Like Any Other
Lisel Mueller

Such insignificance: a glance
at your record on the doctor's desk
or a letter not meant for you.
How could you have known? It's not true
that your life passes before you
in rapid motion, but your watch
suddenly ticks like an amplified heart,
the hands freezing against a white
that is a judgment. Otherwise nothing.
The face in the mirror is still yours.
Two men pass on the sidewalk
and do not stare at your window.
Your room is silent, the plants
locked inside their mysterious lives
as always. The queen-of-the-night
refuses to bloom, does not accept
your definition. It makes no sense,
your scanning the street for a traffic snarl,
a new crack in the pavement,
a flag at half-mast -- signs
of some disturbance in the world
because your friend, the morning sun,
has turned its dark side toward you.

[RetroLounge]

3. Very nice!

:hi:

RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. My dear miss_american_pie!

I have felt, and lived, the truth of this poem......

Especially the last 3-4 lines:

"signs
of some disturbance in the world
because your friend, the morning sun,
has turned its dark side toward you."

There is so much pain, and beauty in these lines......

Thank you......

:cry:

[miss_american_pie]

5. Awww

:hug: I always feel so guilty when people post this :cry: to me.

Mueller's "When I am Asked" is good, too, but it's another one about death.

Oh and here's another of hers.

Romantics
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

7. My dear miss_american_pie!

Please do not feel guilty about my use of the crying smiley...

It is not your fault that I feel that way about the lines I quoted!

In fact, I have seen a loved one turn away, and the metaphor of the sun was so appropriate!

Do NOT blame yourself......those lines were perfect for what I felt at the time!

:hug:

[miss_american_pie]

8. ...

:hug:

[yvr girl]

6. I like Monet's world better than the doctor's

:D

[RetroLounge]

9. Yes indeed, much better.

:hi:

:hug:

RL

[RetroLounge]

10. kick

:kick:

RL