Giverny

The best thing to do upon arriving Charles de Gaulle Airport after a long overnight flight with two small children is to drive straight west to Giverny and flop down in the grass at the bottom of a field of blooming poppies. Play pretend baseball with your three-year-old son and work out the kinks. Stroll slowly through the village peeking through gorgeously-weathered iron gates. Have a cup of tea and an ice cream cone. Walk through Claude Monet's home and garden by the opposite route recommended to avoid getting stuck behind tour groups. Sit under a weeping willow tree, take in the waterlilies, listen to frogs croak and eat biscuits offered by friendly Finnish women. Offer to take photos of others and ask them to take photos of you. Continue driving west to the pretty farmhouse you've rented for a fraction of the cost of a hotel room in Paris. Despite being deliriously tired, push on and go to the local creperie for a quick gallette. End up staying for an unbelievable three-course meal and close down the restaurant. Fall into bed, sleep a solid 12 hours and wake up on French time.

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 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.

~ Lisel Mueller