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. . .
and now you want to to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three dimensional space.
-- Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation"
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