Lisel Mueller

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature. It was soon after my mother died, a brilliant June day, everything blooming. I sat on a gray stone bench in a lovingly planted garden, but the day lilies were as deaf as the ears of drunken sleepers and the roses curved inward. Nothing was black or broken and not a leaf fell and the sun blared endless commercials for summer holidays. I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me.

In memory of my parents People whose lives have been shaped by history—and it is always tragic— do not want to talk about it, would rather dance, give parties on thrift-shop china. You feel wonderful in their homes, two leaky rooms, nests they stowed inside their hearts on the road into exile. They know how to fix potato peelings and apple cores so you smack your lips. The words start over again hold no terror for them. Obediently they rise and go with only a rucksack or tote bag. If they weep, it’s when you’re not looking. To tame their nightmares, they choose the most dazzling occupations, swallow the flames in the sunset sky, jump through burning hoops in their elegant tiger suits. Cover your eyes: there’s one walking on a thread thirty feet above us— shivering points of light leap across her body, and she works without a net.

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue. We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen to their emotional language, and because we loved graceful profiles the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck. Even what was beyond us was recast in our image; we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood and you are passing a crumbling mansion completely hidden behind old willows or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks and giant firs standing hip to hip, you know again that behind that wall, under the uncut hair of the willows something secret is going on, so marvelous and dangerous that if you crawled through and saw, you would die, or be happy forever.

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 us nothing to overhear.

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air have long enough walled love away from love; stillness has hardened until words despair of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie against a weather which holds out on them, waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips, syllable by monotonous syllable, that wash away the sullen griefs of love and drown out knowledge of an ancient war— o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain, let love be brought to ignorance again. Originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Poetry magazine.

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.” —Martin Gardner, in Scientific American Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am putting on. It is evening in the antiworld where she lives. She is forty-five years away from her death, the hole which spit her out into pain, impossible at first, later easing, going, gone. She has unlearned much by now. Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens, her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses, she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks, but their ardor increases. Soon her second child will be young enough to fight its way into her body and change its life to monkey to frog to tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to nothing. She is making a list: Things I will need in the past lipstick shampoo transistor radio Sergeant Pepper acne cream five-year diary with a lock She is eager, having heard about adolescent love and the freedom of children. She wants to read Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster without getting sick. I think of her as she will be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the mirror I see she uses her left hand to write, her other to open a jar. By now our lives should have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have passed one another like going and coming trains, with both of us looking the other way.

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.

It lies in our hands in crystals too intricate to decipher It goes into the skillet without being given a second thought It spills on the floor so fine we step all over it We carry a pinch behind each eyeball It breaks out on our foreheads We store it inside our bodies in secret wineskins At supper, we pass it around the table talking of holidays and the sea.

In the America of the dream the first rise of the moon swings free of the ocean, and she reigns in her shining flesh over a good, great valley of plumped, untrampled grasses and beasts with solemn eyes, of lovers infallibly pitched in their ascendant phase. In this America, death is virginal also, roaming the good, great valley in his huge boots, his shadow steady and lean, his pistol silver, his greeting clear and courteous as a stranger’s who looks for another, a mind to share his peaceable evenings. Dreaming, we are another race than the one which wakes in the cold sweat of fear, fires wild shots at death., builds slippery towers of glass to head him off, waylays him with alcohol traps, rides him down in canyons of sex, and hides in teetering ghost towns. Dreaming, we are the mad who swear by the blood of trees and speak with the tongues of streams through props of steel and sawdust, a colony of souls ravaged by visions, bound to some wild, secret cove not yet possessed, a place still innocent of us.