April is National Poetry month and I thought I’d share a poem that has taken on more meaning to me recently. I have always admired Lisel Mueller’s poem, “Monet Refuses the Operation” and I found myself thinking about it when I recently hurt my left eye.

I wear contact lenses and I store them at night in a special cleaning chemical that neutralizes and turns into saline solution by morning. In Ecuador, there aren’t the same consumer protection laws and so the bottle of this special solution does not have a big red ring around it like my brand in the United States.

Last week I put that solution directly in my eye instead of using saline solution and let me just tell you, it’s not a good idea. Besides being extremely painful, it’s rather difficult to extract a contact lens from your eye when you’re instinct is to clamp your eye shut.

Luckily, Peace Corps has doctors and nurses on stand-by to help in such emergencies. Paul got on the telephone and was able to get instructions for how to treat and later medicate my sore and swollen eye. After resting for several days, my eye is as good as new. However, I was recuperating for several days. As I lay in bed with my eyes covered, I thought a lot about Monet and his refusal.

I walked around without lenses and with only the use of one eye for several days and what I experienced was a different world. Since it gave me headaches, I didn’t spend too much time walking around with just one eye open but I thought it was important to attend the Mujeres Cambia meeting so I did venture out for that.

Outside, colors seemed brighter as details faded. I noticed the outlines of shapes, I noticed sounds more, I noticed the way the sun felt on my back. While I would never wish a mishap like the one I experienced on anyone, I would recommend attempting to interact with the world in a new way. You might find that tuning out the details and imperfections you see may add to the beauty to the world around you.

Monet Refuses the Operation

BY LISEL MUELLER

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.

National Poetry Month

Monet Refuses the Operation