{"id":216892845,"date":"2010-02-11T21:10:29","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T08:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=216892845"},"modified":"2010-12-31T11:18:10","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T22:18:10","slug":"monet-refuses-the-operation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=216892845","title":{"rendered":"Monet refuses the operation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Monet<\/a><\/p>\n

I know absolutely nothing of Lisel Mueller or her poetry. \u00a0I came across this poem yesterday and immediately loved it for its premise, certainty of tone and wonderfully rich imagery.<\/p>\n

Monet refuses the operation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Doctor, you say there are no halos
\naround the streetlights in Paris
\nand what I see is an aberration
\ncaused by old age, an affliction.
\nI tell you it has taken me all my life
\nto arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
\nto soften and blur and finally banish
\nthe edges you regret I don\u2019t see,
\nto learn that the line I called the horizon
\ndoes not exist and sky and water,
\nso long apart, are the same state of being.
\nFifty-four years before I could see
\nRouen cathedral is built
\nof parallel shafts of sun,
\nand now you want to restore
\nmy youthful errors: fixed
\nnotions of top and bottom,
\nthe illusion of three-dimensional space,
\nwisteria separate
\nfrom the bridge it covers.
\nWhat can I say to convince you
\nthe Houses of Parliament dissolve
\nnight after night to become
\nthe fluid dream of the Thames?
\nI will not return to a universe
\nof objects that don\u2019t know each other,
\nas if islands were not the lost children
\nof one great continent. The world
\nis flux, and light becomes what it touches,
\nbecomes water, lilies on water,
\nabove and below water,
\nbecomes lilac and mauve and yellow
\nand white and cerulean lamps,
\nsmall fists passing sunlight
\nso quickly to one another
\nthat it would take long, streaming hair
\ninside my brush to catch it.
\nTo paint the speed of light!
\nOur weighted shapes, these verticals,
\nburn to mix with air
\nand change our bones, skin, clothes
\nto gases. Doctor,
\nif only you could see
\nhow heaven pulls earth into its arms
\nand how infinitely the heart expands
\nto claim this world, blue vapor without end<\/p>\n

Lisel Mueller was born in\u00a01924 in\u00a0Hamburg and moved to the US in her teens. \u00a0She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Alive Together: New & Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1996. Other awards include the Lamont Poetry Prize (1975), the National Book Award (1981), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2002).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know absolutely nothing of Lisel Mueller or her poetry. \u00a0I came across this poem yesterday and immediately loved it for its premise, certainty of tone and wonderfully rich imagery. Monet refuses the operation Doctor, you say there are no halos around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[326,325,327],"class_list":["post-216892845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ponderings","tag-lisel-mueller","tag-monet-refuses-the-operation","tag-poem"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216892845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216892845"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216892845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216893178,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216892845\/revisions\/216893178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216892845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216892845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216892845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}