This morning I am going . . . early . . . to have the cataract removed from my right eye. While I am nervous about having it done, I will be glad to be able to see the birds at the water bowl more clearly, to read more easily, and to do beading and art I have been putting off because I see so badly at the moment. I will have the other one done as soon as I see how this one goes and if I can work it in while I am doing school.
The poem for this morning is one that describes what you see with cataracts pretty well, though Monet might refuse the operation, I am not going to. I might miss some of the lovely . . . smudges that light makes, but I will enjoy the brightness of colors that will return with a clear lens, as well has seeing only one moon in the sky, though the overlapping, venn diagram of moons has been . . . interesting. Yesterday my sister sent me this very poem, knowing what I was going to do today. I thought, yep, we are truly sisters, who would have thought we would pick the same poem for this occasion, one that seems to speak against having the surgery done? I should have thought; I know it is one of her favorite poems as it is mine as well.
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.
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.
Lisel Mueller
We all see the world in different ways, in different arrangements of color, just ask any artist, any beader who asks another to confirm what color those beads are, any one who sews, or knits, or does any kind of work with color, will tell you color is very subjective. It's one of those things that make you believe in a consensus universe; we all just agree, yes, that range of color is sort of blue, or green, or purple, or some lovely shade of brown.
Look at colors today! I am sure I will be looking at them!
Look at colors today! I am sure I will be looking at them!
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