After “Monet Refuses the Operation” by Lisel Mueller
for Anne on her birthday
You have seen
my youthful errors, made
over and over—words bent wrong
until they crunch like
snapped fibulas.
It will take me all my life
to arrive at the way sweat pools
in a blue-veined wrist as the neighborhood
dog barks, to arrive
at the gangrenous leg idling on ice
in your passenger seat, and,
finally, at the heart’s delicate machinery
suspended in blue, above
and below water, lilies on water—
and what can I say to convince you
that what I have heard
is enough to sustain the Sound’s fluid dream in me,
each word a sonic boom that ripples still,
an iambic heartbeat over each starry night?
Indeed, sound becomes what it touches,
translucent skin taut over drum until we hear
the sound of our own blood,
how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world,
blue vapor without end, blue as blood,
and two white lilies float each
away over the Sound, white wrists
extended like sails
to paint the wind.