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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