Monet Refuses the Operation Doctor, you say that 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 …
Poetry
Full of Wild Grace
Opposite a Post-Station, the Boat Moonlit Beside a Monastery My boat mirroring a clear, bright moon Deep in the night, I leave lanterns unlit. A gold monastery stands beyond green maples Here, a red post-tower beside white water. Faint, drifting from the city, a crow's cry Fades. Full of wild grace, egrets sleep. Hair white, a guest of lakes and rivers, I tie blinds open and sit …
Still Dizzy With Your Presence
[You who never arrived] You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un- suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that …
And I Entered
Late Ripeness Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before. I was …
Hands
At the Bomb Testing Site At noon in the desert a panting lizard waited for history, its elbows tense, watching the curve of a particular road as if something might happen. It was looking at something farther off than people could see, an important scene acted in stone for little selves at the flute end of consequences. There was just a continent without much on it under a sky that …
Sabbath
From Wendell Berry's introduction to This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems: The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry. * …