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Lisel Mueller - 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.

Added: on November 22nd, 2005 at 5:31 PM | Viewed: 2504 times | Comments (4)


Monet Refuses The Operation - Comments and Information

Poet: Lisel Mueller
Poem: Monet Refuses The Operation
Volume: Second Language
Year: Published/Written in 1986

Comment 4 of 4, added on June 11th, 2009 at 5:46 AM.

TO Margaret,

thank you for your post. I think is is as beautiful as the poem by Mueller. Poetry is important because there are people like your mother who live it.

thank you.

david perrings

david perrings from United States
Comment 3 of 4, added on April 24th, 2009 at 1:20 PM.

The Gift of Time


I read Lisel Mueller’s poem, “Monet Refuses The Operation,” aloud, over and over, day after day, as my mother slowly slipped away. I found comfort here but also strength. At first it seemed about a different way of seeing – a way quantum physics also suggests, as I understand it. The solid objects we think we see actually consist of rapidly moving particles with lots of space in between. Cells that have been separated by thousands of miles still long for each other. In other words, reality is not necessarily what we see.

As I thought more about it, the central issue seems to be one of time. Will we have time to mature into a different way of seeing the world? To experience aging not as just a series of losses but also as an opportunity for an expanding perspective and capacity to empathize and love. In 1996, when Mother was 90 years old, she had a quadruple heart bypass operation. As she regained her strength after that shock to her system, I realized we had all been given an amazing gift.

Now, looking back, I find myself considering how Mother used that gift of time. For her children and grandchildren, she had been ambitious and demanding, but by the time she became a great grandmother, she was playful and loving and always enthusiastically supportive. Each of her great grandchildren became one of her “shafts of sun.” She left her need to be judgmental far behind. When given a choice, she chose to participate rather than to observe – eager to go and do. Once she dropped her need to be proper, she could be hysterically funny when playing charades (her routine for the word, Kilimanjaro, is still a family legend) or setting up her grandson, Eric, to be straight man for her one-liners.

Her ability to savor and truly enjoy things she had loved all her life seemed to deepen: praying and attending church services, playing the piano, reading or listening to poetry and her Bible, enjoying the beauty around her, watering her garden, surrounding herself with flowers, and spending time with family and friends. Somehow she managed “to soften and blur and finally banish” the sharp elbows and edges of earlier coping and achieving, and was left with a seemingly endless capacity to express love, gratitude and joy. For someone who in her younger years had emphasized intellectual abilities, she became much more interested in matters of the heart

Her last years seemed to be a lesson in how to emulate the Chinese sage or the Zen search for the essence, the heart of the matter. And in this era when age is to be disguised at all costs, it’s heartening to think, instead, of the opportunities aging can bring: the softening and welcoming, the loving and grateful heart and, most of all, the joy. She used her gift of time well until “heaven pull[ed her] into its arms.”

Margaret Harrell



Margaret Harrell from United States
Comment 2 of 4, added on November 22nd, 2005 at 5:31 PM.

I first read this poem in 2003 . I was immediately touched by it and for a long time I had been in a mood created by this poem.It is the very intonation of the narrator that captured me.

I really like this poem .

Li Yiliang from China

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