(no subject)

[pantryslut]

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,
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.


(Liesel Mueller)

Comments

Thanks....

[imnotandrei.livejournal.com]

...for reminding me of this one.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Good one.

This is exactly what I say when approached about laser eye correction. But in fewer words. I can remove my glasses and have a gift that those with "perfect" vision can't achieve.

(My vision is something like 20/800; without correction, I can't read a computer screen beyond six inches.)

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

My eyes are about that bad as well.

[brooksmoses]

Heh. My reaction to laser eye correction is that, right now, I can put on glasses and have 20/10 vision. There's still a non-negligible chance that after the surgery I wouldn't be able to have vision anywhere close to that, and it's simply not worth the risk for what to me is a pretty small gain.

Interestingly, my eye doctor says that the laser eye surgery seems to be significantly more common among people with less serious vision problems; his theory is that those of us with worse vision have a better idea what we'd lose if it didn't work right.

[gramina.livejournal.com]

Thank you; I hadn't seen this before.

And yes. I don't want to lose the way a lit Christmas tree looks in the dark without my glasses on. And I wonder whether my interest in -- *looks for word* -- in porous boundaries, in fuzzy, relation-based ways of thinking, might not come from the fact that my primary ways of knowing are really non-visual ways. (Without my glasses, I have to bring something up to about a hand-width from my face to see, oh, text clearly enough to read it.)

*G* Plus, I have the added bonus of astigmatism making my world prettier. People used to tell me that I should be able to tell planets from stars because stars twinkle... with my astigmatism, even with my glasses on, street lights twinkle. Headlights twinkle. Fluorescent overhead lights do *not* twinkle, but I'm not sure without checking what if anything else in the light family does not twinkle. *s*

I do wonder what affect my early non-glasses-wearing years had on my ways of thinking and of perceiving the world.

[manomano.livejournal.com]

I am so happy I got my eyes fixed. I can see better than contacts ever could make my eyes, and I don't have a weight pulling down my face. I feel that my reaction to the world is now unmediated by any intrusion. And I can read the clock next to my head in the morning. I can still imagine/remember what it was like, so my mind's eye provides me with all the poetic imagry I need.

My eyes were so bad, my doctor refused to give me a 20 rating. "Essentially, there's nothing you can see at 20 feet, so it's meaningless."

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

You geeks can be so literal :)

I thought about posting my own comments/reflections on laser eye surgery, but then decided against it. People can make any decision they want in regards to it, and that's really all I have to say. Last time I checked, the surgery wouldn't correct one of my major vision problems, so for me it's moot.

And that's not why I like the poem anyway.