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.
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