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Monet Refuses the Operation. ---by Lisel Mueller (The painter Claude Monet had cataracts and when his doctor wanted to perform surgery, Monet refused. He wanted to paint light. He loved seeing the blurred edges of everything as evidence of our interconnection.)
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. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE TO US AND THE WORDS WE USE
BY ADA LIMÓN All these great barns out here in the outskirts, black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass. They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use. You say they look like arks after the sea’s dried up, I say they look like pirate ships, and I think of that walk in the valley where J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds-- disorderly, and marvelous, and ours. "SOMEDAY, I'LL LOVE OCEAN VUONG"
BY OCEAN VUONG After Frank O’Hara / After Roger Reeves Ocean, don’t be afraid. The end of the road is so far ahead it is already behind us. Don’t worry. Your father is only your father until one of you forgets. Like how the spine won’t remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement. Ocean, are you listening? The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother’s shadow falls. Here’s the house with childhood whittled down to a single red tripwire. Don’t worry. Just call it horizon & you’ll never reach it. Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not a lifeboat. Here’s the man whose arms are wide enough to gather your leaving. & here the moment, just after the lights go out, when you can still see the faint torch between his legs. How you use it again & again to find your own hands. You asked for a second chance & are given a mouth to empty into. Don’t be afraid, the gunfire is only the sound of people trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean, get up. The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world. Here’s the room with everyone in it. Your dead friends passing through you like wind through a wind chime. Here’s a desk with the gimp leg & a brick to make it last. Yes, here’s a room so warm & blood-close, I swear, you will wake-- & mistake these walls for skin. From Night Sky with Exit Wounds |