Lisel Mueller Quotes

How I would paint happiness
Something hidden, a windfall,
A meteor shower. No-
A flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom ...

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things

At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

I search the language for a word
to tell you how red is red.

I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.

My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.

Heartland
Now that we've given our hearts away
With the bric-a-brac, we want them back.
Now we look for them secondhand,
Someone else's, in the old songs,
The slowly unfolding novels
We never had time for. Hearts
That taught themselves to fly;
…overstuffed hearts, still leaking
Downy secrets like feathers.

We want someone to say,
'I give you my heart', meaning,
'Summer and winter', meaning
'All my time in the this world'…

O brave new world, that hath such people in it
Soon you will be like her, Prospero's daughter,
Finding the door that leads you out of yourself,
Out of the rare, enameled ark of your mind,
Where you live with the gracious and light-footed creatures
That thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom.

Because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees
Because the story of our life
becomes our life
Because each of us tells the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it the same way twice . (from, Why We Tell Stories)

Monet Refuses the Operation"

Doctor, you say that there are no halos
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 weig

I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.

Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

Late Hours
On summer nights the world
moves within earshot
on the interstate with its swish
and growl, and occasional siren
that sends chills through us.
Sometimes, on clear, still nights,
voices float into our bedroom,
lunar and fragmented,
as if the sky had let them go
long before our birth.
In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for his world.
What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

You shall not twist my bones into a star's shape, nor plant my hair as roots for the dreams of the living; and if you open my heart and run your poet's fingers over its walls and cushions you will find it is like yours, dark.

I will not return to a universe
of objects that do not know each other, as if islands were not the long lost children of one great continent

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.