October 4: One Evening, Saint Marty's Day Eve, Lisel Mueller, "Monet Refuses the Operation"

...One evening, just before Christmas, snow began falling.  It covered the house and barn and fields and woods.  Wilbur had never seen snow before.  When morning came he went out and plowed the drifts in his yard, for the fun of it.  Fern and Avery arrived, dragging a sled.  They coasted down the lane and out onto the frozen pond in the pasture.

There is a lot of snow in this passage.  I don't mind snow just before Christmas.  In fact, I love snow on Christmas Eve.  A little, not a blizzard.  A Martha Stewart dusting, just enough to make the world look fresh and white.

It's cold enough in the Upper Peninsula this Saint Marty's Day Eve for snow to start falling.  In fact, it's in the forecast.  It's pretty much been raining all day long, and, now that the sun has set, the rain is becoming a little...thicker.  I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up to a white Saint Marty's Day.  The rain and wind today have already stripped bare most of the trees on my street.  There are carpets of yellow, red, and orange in front of almost every house.

That's one thing I love about living in this place.  No matter what time of year it is, I can look outside my window and see an impressionist landscape.  So much light and color and beauty.  Claude Monet would have felt right at home in my neighborhood.  If I were a painter, I would be outside with my easel every day.  Instead, I'm a poet.  So, I sit in my living room and describe what's outside.

Lisel Mueller has a great poem about Claude Monet.  It's about light and lilies and color and aging.

Perfect for this cold, windy Saint Marty's Day Eve.

Monet Refuses the Operation

by:  Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say 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
Routen 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.

Confessions of Saint Marty