Monet Refuses the Operation

BY LISEL MUELLER

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.

Lisel Mueller, "Monet Refuses the Operation" from Second Language. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel
Mueller. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press.

Source: Second Language (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52577/monet-refuses-the-operation-56d231289e6db

Since There Is No Escape

BY SARA TEASDALE

Since there is no escape, since at the end

My body will be utterly destroyed,

This hand I love as I have loved a friend,

This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;

Since there is no escape even for me

Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:

The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea

And hours alone too still and sure for prayer—

Since darkness waits for me, then all the more

Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore

In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;

In these few hours of light I lift my head;

Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead

If there is any way to baffle death.

Source: Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46466/since-there-is-no-escape

ANTONY

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever livèd in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy—

Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips

To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men.

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