Monet Refuses the Operation
is a Lisel Mueller poem, shared with me by a poet friend who knew how scared I was to have my eyes operated on. Now that I've had the cataract surgeries and can see better than ever, I tried to copy one of Claude Monet's masterpieces in the Cincinnati Art Museum -- the Rocks at Belle Isle, shown above.
Seeing as an artist involves more than eyesight, which is why I love Lisel's poem, shared with you here in its entirety:

Doctor, you say there 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 changes 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, thank you for this beautiful poetry. Claude Monet, thank you for the inspiration. Cincinnati Art Museum, thank you for letting the Ohio Plein Air Society paint copies of your masterpieces in January, allowing us to learn from the masters. Stephanie Cowell, thank you for your novel "Claude and Camille."