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Alive Together
In a collection that represents over thirty-five years of her writing life, this distinguished poet explores a wide range of subjects, which include her cultural and family history and reflect her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language. In fact, her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality - "the hard, dry smack of death against the glass." To this community Mueller presents moments after moment where the personal and public realms intersect, where lives ranging from her own to those of Mary Shelley and Anton Webern illuminate the ways in which history shapes our lives. In "Brendel Playing Schubert," Mueller's breathtaking linguistic virtuosity reminds us how music can transport us out of ourselves and into "the nowhere where the enchanted live"; in "Midwinter Notes," the crepuscular world, stripped of its veil, shines forth as a signal from some realm where the sense of things may be revealed. In the title piece Mueller brings a sense of enduring and unclouded wonder to a recognition of all those whose lives might have been our own.
240 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1996
60 people are currently reading
1430 people want to read
About the author
Lisel Mueller
19 books49 followersPoet and translator Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was 15. They immigrated to the US and settled in the Mid-west. Mueller attended the University of Evansville, where her father was a professor, and did her graduate study at Indiana University.
Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection; Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award; Learning to Play by Ear (1990); and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Her other awards and honors include the Carl Sandburg Award, the Helen Bullis Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has also published translations, most recently Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1990).
(from Poetry Foundation)
Her collections of poetry include The Private Life, which was the 1975 Lamont Poetry Selection; Second Language (1986); The Need to Hold Still (1980), which received the National Book Award; Learning to Play by Ear (1990); and Alive Together: New & Selected Poems (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Her other awards and honors include the Carl Sandburg Award, the Helen Bullis Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has also published translations, most recently Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1990).
(from Poetry Foundation)
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
March 26, 2010
Beautiful, Rilke-like poetry. "Monet Refuses the Operation" is a masterpiece I carry in my head.
April 21, 2013
One of my college professors used to say that the highest form of literature is poetry. It's definitely sometimes the most inaccessible, in my mind. Therefore, this year I've been looking for modern, well-respected poets to read and enjoy.
This was fantastic. Some of the poems were really depressing, but all reflect the life of Ms. Mueller, whose family escaped Nazi Germany. She's a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and this doesn't disappoint.
This book is a collection of many of her poems across the years and includes some new ones.
My favorites (as much as for my memory as for others):
The Laughter of Women
Imaginary Paintings
Tears
American Literature
The Mermaid
Moon Fishing
Highway Poems
What the Dog Perhaps Hears
Palindrome
Love Like Salt
Beginning with 1914
Voyager
The Exhibit
Monet Refuses the Sparrow
Triage
Of course, it's mainly because these poems are either extremely emotional and tell a great story (Beginning with 1914) or reinforce a certain world view I hold (Triage). However, many are about the follies of life - and reflecting upon our human state (Palindrome).
This was fantastic. Some of the poems were really depressing, but all reflect the life of Ms. Mueller, whose family escaped Nazi Germany. She's a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and this doesn't disappoint.
This book is a collection of many of her poems across the years and includes some new ones.
My favorites (as much as for my memory as for others):
The Laughter of Women
Imaginary Paintings
Tears
American Literature
The Mermaid
Moon Fishing
Highway Poems
What the Dog Perhaps Hears
Palindrome
Love Like Salt
Beginning with 1914
Voyager
The Exhibit
Monet Refuses the Sparrow
Triage
Of course, it's mainly because these poems are either extremely emotional and tell a great story (Beginning with 1914) or reinforce a certain world view I hold (Triage). However, many are about the follies of life - and reflecting upon our human state (Palindrome).
January 28, 2008
In the poem "Heartland", Mueller writes: "Now that we've given our hearts away/ with the bric-a-brac, we want them back./ Now we look for them secondhand, someone else's, in the old songs,/the slowly unfolding novels we never had time for. Hearts/ that taught themselves to fly". Her work is full of these kind of accessible, profound lines. Her use of detail and observation, her sheer ability to mine the emotion out of every word with subtle, powerful strokes makes this collection one for the bedside...I think it will be on my "currently-reading" list for awhile as it is worth returning and returning to.
April 20, 2017
“at home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.”
One of the wisest poets I have ever read. Deep, joyous, full of wonder and sorrow all together, wrapped close in my heart and hands. Like Wendell Berry, but even better. While she is not touted as a nature poet, her poems are organic and evoke all that nature is, inside, outside, within, without. She has lovely poems about her parents, “I want the impossible photograph, /one that would show the world/ your trick, how you and she pulled joy from any borrowed hat/or sleeve, a survivor’s art//This is the hardest knowledge: that no one will remember you/when your daughters are gone.” (voyager) I am a little stunned at how much her poems resonate with me, but I am also a daughter of a refugee from war (although not a persecuted Jew) and I recently partially completed a project of editing old photos of my mom and her mom, and there were some with so much joy, it was exactly what Lisel is talking about. I am at a time in my life where life is a little ugly around me, or a lot, and immersing myself in poetry and photos is essential to sustain my soul.
My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.
IN PASSING
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
How I would paint happiness
Something hidden, a windfall,
A meteor shower. No-
A flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom…
Things
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.
Tears
The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater. Seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn't she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
that dripped in her hands when she caught them.
Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body.
ALIVE TOGETHER
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master's bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary's friend, I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who–but for endless ifs–
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.
Heartland
Now that we’ve given our hearts away
With the bric-a-brac, we want them back.
Now we look for them secondhand,
Someone else’s, in the old songs,
The slowly unfolding novels
We never had time for. Hearts
That taught themselves to fly;
…overstuffed hearts, still leaking
Downy secrets like feathers.
We want someone to say,
‘I give you my heart’, meaning,
‘Summer and winter’, meaning
‘All my time in the this world’…
In the Thriving Season
In memory of my mother
Now as she catches fistfuls of sun
riding down dust and air to her crib,
my first child in her first spring
stretches bare hands back to your darkness
and heals your silence, the vast hurt
of your deaf ear and mute tongue
with doves hatched in her young throat.
Now ghost-begotten infancies
are the marrow of trees and pools
and blue uprisings in the woods
spread revolution to the mind,
I can believe birth is fathered
by death, believe that she was quick
when you forgave pain and terror
and shook the fever from your blood
Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love.
O brave new world, that hath such people in it
Soon you will be like her, Prospero’s daughter,
Finding the door that leads you out of yourself,
Out of the rare, enameled ark of you mind,
Where you live with the gracious and light-footed creatures
That thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom.
Soon you will see the face, child, of a man
With its ridges and slopes, it cisterns of natural light;
You will wander y streams across the plain of a hand,
Envy the dark as it lies down on a shoulder,
And for the sake of that shoulder, that hand, that face,
Banish yourself from the one flawless place.
Not Only the Eskimos
Not only the Eskimos
We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:
the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,
guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,
rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,
snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,
surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can't find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science-fiction movie,
snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,
unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart's birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian Fields
and strangers spoke to each other,
paper snow, cut and taped,
to the inside of grade-school windows,
in an old tale, the snow
that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,
the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,
the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of furs,
though we have never traveled
to Russia or worn furs,
Villon's snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,
the snow in Joyce's "The Dead,"
the silent, secret snow
in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,
the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,
snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,
the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,
the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,
the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,
the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.
Why We Tell Stories
I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak
2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees
3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life
Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it
the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them
and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and
Necessities
1
A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas,
but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in.
With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up.
The green smear of the woods we first made love in.
The yellow city we thought was our future.
The red highways not traveled, the green ones
with their missed exits, the black side roads
which took us where we had not meant to go.
The high peaks, recorded by relatives,
though we prefer certain unmarked elevations,
the private alps no one knows we have climbed.
The careful boundaries we draw and erase.
And always, around the edges,
the opaque wash of blue, concealing
the drop-off they have stepped into before us,
singly, mapless, not looking back.
2
The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it:
tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off.
Wheels turning but going nowhere.
Paintings flat, with no vanishing point.
The plots of all novels circular;
page numbers reversing themselves past the middle.
The mountaintop no longer a goal,
merely the point between ascent and descent.
All streets looping back on themselves;
life as a beckoning road an absurd idea.
Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods;
the years refusing to drag themselves
toward the new century.
And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead,
no longer a household animal.
3
Answers to questions, an endless supply.
New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us.
All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment
solutions, like kisses or surgery.
Rising inflections countered by level voices,
words beginning with w hushed
by declarative sentences. The small, bold sphere
of the period chasing after the hook,
the doubter that walks on water
and treads air and refuses to go away.
4
Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane
which, at the last moment, we did not take.
The involuntary turn of the head,
which caused the bullet to miss us.
The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight
to the smell of gas. The moon's
full blessing when we fell in love,
its black mood when it was all over.
Confirm us, we say to the world,
with your weather, your gifts, your warnings,
your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences.
5
Even now, the old things first things,
which taught us language. Things of day and of night.
Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon.
Fire as revolution, grass as the heir
to all revolutions. Snow
as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered.
The river as what we wish it to be.
Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness.
Summits. Chasms. Clearings.
And stars, which gave us the word distance,
so we could name our deepest sadness.
Monet Refuses the Operation
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 dissolves
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.
One of the wisest poets I have ever read. Deep, joyous, full of wonder and sorrow all together, wrapped close in my heart and hands. Like Wendell Berry, but even better. While she is not touted as a nature poet, her poems are organic and evoke all that nature is, inside, outside, within, without. She has lovely poems about her parents, “I want the impossible photograph, /one that would show the world/ your trick, how you and she pulled joy from any borrowed hat/or sleeve, a survivor’s art//This is the hardest knowledge: that no one will remember you/when your daughters are gone.” (voyager) I am a little stunned at how much her poems resonate with me, but I am also a daughter of a refugee from war (although not a persecuted Jew) and I recently partially completed a project of editing old photos of my mom and her mom, and there were some with so much joy, it was exactly what Lisel is talking about. I am at a time in my life where life is a little ugly around me, or a lot, and immersing myself in poetry and photos is essential to sustain my soul.
My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.
IN PASSING
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
How I would paint happiness
Something hidden, a windfall,
A meteor shower. No-
A flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom…
Things
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.
Tears
The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater. Seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn't she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
that dripped in her hands when she caught them.
Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body.
ALIVE TOGETHER
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard's woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master's bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary's friend, I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who–but for endless ifs–
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.
Heartland
Now that we’ve given our hearts away
With the bric-a-brac, we want them back.
Now we look for them secondhand,
Someone else’s, in the old songs,
The slowly unfolding novels
We never had time for. Hearts
That taught themselves to fly;
…overstuffed hearts, still leaking
Downy secrets like feathers.
We want someone to say,
‘I give you my heart’, meaning,
‘Summer and winter’, meaning
‘All my time in the this world’…
In the Thriving Season
In memory of my mother
Now as she catches fistfuls of sun
riding down dust and air to her crib,
my first child in her first spring
stretches bare hands back to your darkness
and heals your silence, the vast hurt
of your deaf ear and mute tongue
with doves hatched in her young throat.
Now ghost-begotten infancies
are the marrow of trees and pools
and blue uprisings in the woods
spread revolution to the mind,
I can believe birth is fathered
by death, believe that she was quick
when you forgave pain and terror
and shook the fever from your blood
Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love.
O brave new world, that hath such people in it
Soon you will be like her, Prospero’s daughter,
Finding the door that leads you out of yourself,
Out of the rare, enameled ark of you mind,
Where you live with the gracious and light-footed creatures
That thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom.
Soon you will see the face, child, of a man
With its ridges and slopes, it cisterns of natural light;
You will wander y streams across the plain of a hand,
Envy the dark as it lies down on a shoulder,
And for the sake of that shoulder, that hand, that face,
Banish yourself from the one flawless place.
Not Only the Eskimos
Not only the Eskimos
We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:
the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,
guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,
rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,
snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,
surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can't find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science-fiction movie,
snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,
unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart's birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian Fields
and strangers spoke to each other,
paper snow, cut and taped,
to the inside of grade-school windows,
in an old tale, the snow
that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,
the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,
the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of furs,
though we have never traveled
to Russia or worn furs,
Villon's snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,
the snow in Joyce's "The Dead,"
the silent, secret snow
in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,
the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,
snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,
the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,
the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,
the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,
the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.
Why We Tell Stories
I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak
2
We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would open only for us
and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else
and because we had survived
sisters and brothers, daughters and sons,
we discovered bones that rose
from the dark earth and sang
as white birds in the trees
3
Because the story of our life
becomes our life
Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently
and none of us tells it
the same way twice
Because grandmothers looking like spiders
want to enchant the children
and grandfathers need to convince us
what happened happened because of them
and though we listen only
haphazardly, with one ear,
we will begin our story
with the word and
Necessities
1
A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas,
but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in.
With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up.
The green smear of the woods we first made love in.
The yellow city we thought was our future.
The red highways not traveled, the green ones
with their missed exits, the black side roads
which took us where we had not meant to go.
The high peaks, recorded by relatives,
though we prefer certain unmarked elevations,
the private alps no one knows we have climbed.
The careful boundaries we draw and erase.
And always, around the edges,
the opaque wash of blue, concealing
the drop-off they have stepped into before us,
singly, mapless, not looking back.
2
The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it:
tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off.
Wheels turning but going nowhere.
Paintings flat, with no vanishing point.
The plots of all novels circular;
page numbers reversing themselves past the middle.
The mountaintop no longer a goal,
merely the point between ascent and descent.
All streets looping back on themselves;
life as a beckoning road an absurd idea.
Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods;
the years refusing to drag themselves
toward the new century.
And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead,
no longer a household animal.
3
Answers to questions, an endless supply.
New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us.
All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment
solutions, like kisses or surgery.
Rising inflections countered by level voices,
words beginning with w hushed
by declarative sentences. The small, bold sphere
of the period chasing after the hook,
the doubter that walks on water
and treads air and refuses to go away.
4
Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane
which, at the last moment, we did not take.
The involuntary turn of the head,
which caused the bullet to miss us.
The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight
to the smell of gas. The moon's
full blessing when we fell in love,
its black mood when it was all over.
Confirm us, we say to the world,
with your weather, your gifts, your warnings,
your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences.
5
Even now, the old things first things,
which taught us language. Things of day and of night.
Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon.
Fire as revolution, grass as the heir
to all revolutions. Snow
as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered.
The river as what we wish it to be.
Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness.
Summits. Chasms. Clearings.
And stars, which gave us the word distance,
so we could name our deepest sadness.
Monet Refuses the Operation
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 dissolves
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.
September 20, 2021
Disclaimer: I haven't read a full book of poetry in decades.
But sometime last year, I dusted off my bookshelves, looking for some poetry. Perhaps it was the pandemic spinning the world out of control that caused me to reach for it? I loved reading poetry as a young girl through my teens, but then I stopped after college, because some of the required reading (Geoffrey Chaucer, anyone?) sucked much of the joy out of it.
Not long ago, a blogger I follow quoted a poem, 'Palindrome', by Lisel Mueller. I was so captivated by it that I bought this book of her poetry, which won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1996. I'm going on a road trip tomorrow with my sisters, and looking forward to reading "Highway Poems" to them from this book. A marvelous collection!
My world has become much smaller the last 18 months, staying at home, but it has afforded me the luxury of more reading time and allowing my mind to travel, easy to do with a book as engaging as this one.
Will close with the first poem from Alive Together:
IN PASSING
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
* * * * * * * * * * *
But sometime last year, I dusted off my bookshelves, looking for some poetry. Perhaps it was the pandemic spinning the world out of control that caused me to reach for it? I loved reading poetry as a young girl through my teens, but then I stopped after college, because some of the required reading (Geoffrey Chaucer, anyone?) sucked much of the joy out of it.
Not long ago, a blogger I follow quoted a poem, 'Palindrome', by Lisel Mueller. I was so captivated by it that I bought this book of her poetry, which won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1996. I'm going on a road trip tomorrow with my sisters, and looking forward to reading "Highway Poems" to them from this book. A marvelous collection!
My world has become much smaller the last 18 months, staying at home, but it has afforded me the luxury of more reading time and allowing my mind to travel, easy to do with a book as engaging as this one.
Will close with the first poem from Alive Together:
IN PASSING
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
* * * * * * * * * * *
March 15, 2024
This is a very subjective rating: this book is very good and the poems are pretty, too pretty almost! I want poetry to be a lil ugly and to feel like a punch. Loved some poems here and there but overall it’s just not my style.
July 3, 2021
I needed this.
August 7, 2023
I’ve got so much love in my heart for this collection, specifically the eponymous poem & The Blind Leading the Blind. Working my way through it, not in any hurry
April 21, 2024
"we make just dreams out of our unjust lives."
October 9, 2025
"In the play, we know what must happen
long before it happens,
and we call it tragedy.
Here at home, this winter,
we have no name for it."
long before it happens,
and we call it tragedy.
Here at home, this winter,
we have no name for it."
October 23, 2011
Upon my third reading, I can, without question, say that "Alive Together" is my most favorite of all contemporary poetry collections.
True, I do no read as many poetry collections as novels or short stories, but of the ones I have read (poets publishing in the last 30 years), Lisel Mueller is my absolute favorite.
Quite simply, she speaks to me. Her language refreshes me, her glimpses into childhood fill me with hope and imagination, a nostalgia that is bittersweet and longing. She is straightforward, and yet her words cast the world anew. She is at once abstract, and somehow (paradoxically) concrete and relevant.
Of all the poems in this collection, my favorites are "Sometimes, When the Light"--a gorgeous reflection on how the light can strike just right, and remind you of the past--and "Love Like Salt," which is just lovely in its simple meditation on the pantheistic connection between each other and nature.
A few favorite lines that blow me away:
"Snow: Telephone poles relax their spines;/sidewalks go under. The nightly groans/of aging porches are put to sleep."
"Someone who does not know you/somewhere is cleaning his rifle,/carefully weighing the bullets/that will put you out of his life."
"Memory is the only/afterlife I can understand,/and when it's gone, they're gone."
"Alive" is a gorgeous collection, and I cannot recommend it enough.
True, I do no read as many poetry collections as novels or short stories, but of the ones I have read (poets publishing in the last 30 years), Lisel Mueller is my absolute favorite.
Quite simply, she speaks to me. Her language refreshes me, her glimpses into childhood fill me with hope and imagination, a nostalgia that is bittersweet and longing. She is straightforward, and yet her words cast the world anew. She is at once abstract, and somehow (paradoxically) concrete and relevant.
Of all the poems in this collection, my favorites are "Sometimes, When the Light"--a gorgeous reflection on how the light can strike just right, and remind you of the past--and "Love Like Salt," which is just lovely in its simple meditation on the pantheistic connection between each other and nature.
A few favorite lines that blow me away:
"Snow: Telephone poles relax their spines;/sidewalks go under. The nightly groans/of aging porches are put to sleep."
"Someone who does not know you/somewhere is cleaning his rifle,/carefully weighing the bullets/that will put you out of his life."
"Memory is the only/afterlife I can understand,/and when it's gone, they're gone."
"Alive" is a gorgeous collection, and I cannot recommend it enough.
January 1, 2022
Bedtime Story
The moon lies on the river
like a drop of oil.
The children come to the banks to be healed
of their wounds and bruises.
The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises
come to be healed of their rage.
The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften,
the birds in their throats awake.
They all stand hand in hand
and the trees around them,
forever on the verge
of becoming on of them,
stop shuddering and speak their first word.
But that is not the beginning.
It is the end of the story,
and before we come to the end,
the mothers and fathers and children
must find their way to the river,
separately, with no one to guide them.
That is the long, pitiless part,
and it will scare you.
(Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together)
Alive Together is exactly the right name for a collection of poems from 1986-1996 which feel like they were written for this moment, too. Dark histories, the wisdom of fairy tales, the experiences of immigrants, childhood curiosities, mothers and daughters, love for the earth, memory, grief, the strangeness of aging. It’s all here. One piece in particular, The End of Science Fiction, has sat on my kitchen counter for daily reading since the first days of the current pandemic. So much thought and depth lives in each poem. This is a book to keep close at hand in days of sorrow and days of waiting.
The moon lies on the river
like a drop of oil.
The children come to the banks to be healed
of their wounds and bruises.
The fathers who gave them their wounds and bruises
come to be healed of their rage.
The mothers grow lovely; their faces soften,
the birds in their throats awake.
They all stand hand in hand
and the trees around them,
forever on the verge
of becoming on of them,
stop shuddering and speak their first word.
But that is not the beginning.
It is the end of the story,
and before we come to the end,
the mothers and fathers and children
must find their way to the river,
separately, with no one to guide them.
That is the long, pitiless part,
and it will scare you.
(Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together)
Alive Together is exactly the right name for a collection of poems from 1986-1996 which feel like they were written for this moment, too. Dark histories, the wisdom of fairy tales, the experiences of immigrants, childhood curiosities, mothers and daughters, love for the earth, memory, grief, the strangeness of aging. It’s all here. One piece in particular, The End of Science Fiction, has sat on my kitchen counter for daily reading since the first days of the current pandemic. So much thought and depth lives in each poem. This is a book to keep close at hand in days of sorrow and days of waiting.
August 3, 2018
YESSSSSSS. This is what a volume of poetry should be (although this is actually selections from several volumes bound together): it challenges me, it pushes me to write my own work, it is stirring and beautiful in a lovely and slightly melancholic way. I wouldn't say that Mueller is the best poet ever, nor do I like every poem in here; some of them are a bit too esoteric or have a stilted feel to them or are simply too descriptive for my taste (I'm not a fan of poetry that reads like someone just chopped up a block of prose). But there are some great pieces here ranging from commentaries on current events to observations of nature to the business of being human with other humans. A great read, to be savored slowly.
February 21, 2017
Review: Some good flourishes, but nothing too exciting. Such as this prediction poem, which easily is relevant today as when it was written.
Whoever you are: a letter
someone who does not know you somewhere is cleaning his rifle
carefully weighing the bullets that will put you out of his life.
someone perhaps the figure
you see in the rearview mirror
is living ahead of your death
dreaming the sick world green
someone is already climbing
a tower in texas, is halfway up
is at the top, has sought you out
and lifts his gun as though this death
had anything to do with you
Whoever you are: a letter
someone who does not know you somewhere is cleaning his rifle
carefully weighing the bullets that will put you out of his life.
someone perhaps the figure
you see in the rearview mirror
is living ahead of your death
dreaming the sick world green
someone is already climbing
a tower in texas, is halfway up
is at the top, has sought you out
and lifts his gun as though this death
had anything to do with you
April 16, 2013
I'm torn between feeling so grateful that Mueller wrote this collection full of wisdom and insight, and wildly jealous that I didn't write them myself because they are so beautiful. I love how she weaves fairy tale and history into her poems with such spot-on imagery. This will be one of my favorite collections forever.
November 7, 2011
This is my all-time favourite book of poems. Don't really know why except the verse speaks to me each time i pick it up. I like the language,the imageries and her voice. My favourite would have to be "Brendel playing schubert".
October 2, 2007
Earthy but beautifully controlled.
April 1, 2015
A beautifully sad sweet language. Every poem is worthy of committing to memory.
June 19, 2007
My favorite modern poet. Her verse is very moving, and you don't have to "get" poetry to enjoy her.
May 29, 2014
Mueller is a master of language, that much is clear. This volume of poetry alternates between the mundane and the miraculous. The opening poem, Curriculum Vitae, is autobiographical, Spartan, and in short summarizes her life:
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an old man’s loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I. (5)
Similarly, I find the beautiful verse from “On Reading an Anthology of Postwar German Poetry” to be good, stern wisdom:
I know enough to refuse to say
That life is good,
But I act as though it were,
And skeptical about love, I survive
By the witness of my own. (88)
Some of the poems are about everyday, unremarkable things, turned into wonderful imagery. A great example is Pigeons:
Like every kingdom,
the kingdom of birds
has its multitude of the poor,
the urban, public poor
whose droppings whiten
shingles and sidewalks,
who pick and pick
(but rarely choose)
whatever meets their beaks:
the daily litter
in priceless Italian cities,
and here, around City Hall—
always underfoot,
offending fastidious people
with places to go.
No one remembers how it happened,
their decline, the near-
abandonment of flight,
the querulous murmurs,
the garbage-filled crops.
Once they were elegant, carefree;
they called to each other in rich, deep voices,
and we called them doves
and welcomed them to our gardens.
At times, Mueller’s poetry pushes the reader quite forcefully with its tangible quality, such as in The Power of Music To Disturb
A humid night. Mad June bugs dash themselves
against a window they should know is there;
I hear an owl awaking in the woods
behind our house, and wonder if it shakes
sleep from its eyes and lets its talons play,
stretch and retract, rehearsing for the kill—
and on the radio the music drives
toward death by love, for love, because of love
like some black wave that cannot break itself.
It is a music that luxuriates
in the impossibilities of love
and rides frustration till two ghosts become
alive again, aware of how the end
of every act of love is separateness;
raw, ruthless lovers, desperate enough
to bank on the absurdity of death
for royal consummation, permanence
of feeling, having, knowing, holding on.
My God, he was a devil of a man
who wrote this music so voluptuous
it sucks me in with possibilities
of sense and soul, of pity and desire
which place and time make ludicrous: I sit
across from you hear in our living room
with chairs and books and red geraniums
and ordinary lamplight on the floor
after an ordinary day of love.
How can disaster be so beautiful?
I range the beaches of our lucid world
against that flood, trying to think about
our child upstairs, asleep with her light on
to keep her from vague evils; about us
whose loving has become so natural
that it has rid itself of teeth and claws,
implements for the lovers new at love,
whose jitters goad them into drawing blood.
But O my love, I cannot beat it back,
neither the sound nor what the sound lets loose;
the opulence of agony drowns out
the hard, dry smack of death against the glass
and batters down the seawalls of my mind,
and I am pulled to levels below light
where easy ways of love are meaningless
and creatures feel their way along the dark
by shock of ecstasy and heat of pain. (55)
My favorite poems, however, are included later in the collection. Both are fairly short, but they combine a powerful vision of life with amazing imagery.
Letter From The End Of The World
The reason no longer matters,
the lamp, my curiosity,
my sisters’ insinuations,
never waking up together,
you saying, “Trust me.”
The point is the end of innocence
comes when you look at someone you love
asleep and see how his eyeballs flicker
under their shallow lids.
The point is since I lost you
I have been going around the world
looking for you and finding myself
instead, small scraps of a woman
that are beginning to fit.
At first the mountains closed ranks against me,
blackberries dried in my mouth,
the wind kept turning to face me.
Wherever I came, the music stopped,
sidewalks opened up manholes,
lights went out,
a pregnant woman shielded her face.
But I learned to sleep on the ground
despite the heartbeat of giant oaks
and the moon’s soft taunts at the sun,
the all-night labor of heaving roots,
the mushroom smell of death.
I learned not to throw the bouquets
the wretched made of their wounds
back in their faces, to accept
tears brought me on red pillows,
to knock on plain white doors
without windows or peepholes, not knowing whose voice would say, “Come in.”
The point is I came back
from the deep places. Always
there was help, a man or woman
who asked no questions, an animal’s
warm body, the itch in my muscles
to climb a swinging rope.
I started out as a girl
without a shadow, in iron shoes;
now, at the end of the world
I am a woman full of rain.
The journey back should be easy;
if this reaches you, wait for me. (104)
Necessities
1
A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas,
but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in.
With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up.
The green smear of the woods we first made love in.
The yellow city we thought was our future.
The red highways not traveled, the green ones
with their missed exits, the black side roads
which took us where we had not meant to go.
The high peaks, recorded by relatives,
though we prefer certain unmarked elevations,
the private alps no one knows we have climbed.
The careful boundaries we draw and erase.
And always, around the edges,
the opaque wash of blue, concealing
the drop-off they have stepped into before us,
singly, maples, not looking back.
2
The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it:
tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off.
Wheels turning but going nowhere.
Paintings flat, with no vanishing point.
The plots of all novels circular;
page numbers reversing themselves past the middle.
The mountaintop no longer a goal,
merely the point between ascent and descent.
All streets looping back on themselves;
life as a beckoning road an absurd idea.
Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods;
the years refusing to drag themselves
toward the new century.
And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead,
no longer a household animal.
3
Answers to questions, an endless supply.
New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us.
All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment
solutions, like kisses or surgery.
Rising inflections countered by level voices,
words beginning with w hushed
by declarative sentences. The small, bould sphere
of the period chasing after the hook,
the doubter that walks on water
and treads air and refuses to go away.
4
Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane
which, at the last moment, we did not take.
The involuntary turn of the head,
which caused the bullet to miss us.
The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight
to the smell of gas. The moon’s
full blessing when we fell in love,
its black mood when it was all over.
Confirm us, we say to the world,
with your weather, your gifts, your warnings,
your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences.
5
Even now, the old things first things,
which taught us language. Things of day and of night.
Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon.
Fire as revolution, grass as the heir
to all revolutions. Snow
as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered.
The river as what we wish it to be.
Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness.
Summits. Chasms. Clearings.
And stars, which gave us the word distance,
so we could name our deepest sadness. (156)
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an old man’s loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood, but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I. (5)
Similarly, I find the beautiful verse from “On Reading an Anthology of Postwar German Poetry” to be good, stern wisdom:
I know enough to refuse to say
That life is good,
But I act as though it were,
And skeptical about love, I survive
By the witness of my own. (88)
Some of the poems are about everyday, unremarkable things, turned into wonderful imagery. A great example is Pigeons:
Like every kingdom,
the kingdom of birds
has its multitude of the poor,
the urban, public poor
whose droppings whiten
shingles and sidewalks,
who pick and pick
(but rarely choose)
whatever meets their beaks:
the daily litter
in priceless Italian cities,
and here, around City Hall—
always underfoot,
offending fastidious people
with places to go.
No one remembers how it happened,
their decline, the near-
abandonment of flight,
the querulous murmurs,
the garbage-filled crops.
Once they were elegant, carefree;
they called to each other in rich, deep voices,
and we called them doves
and welcomed them to our gardens.
At times, Mueller’s poetry pushes the reader quite forcefully with its tangible quality, such as in The Power of Music To Disturb
A humid night. Mad June bugs dash themselves
against a window they should know is there;
I hear an owl awaking in the woods
behind our house, and wonder if it shakes
sleep from its eyes and lets its talons play,
stretch and retract, rehearsing for the kill—
and on the radio the music drives
toward death by love, for love, because of love
like some black wave that cannot break itself.
It is a music that luxuriates
in the impossibilities of love
and rides frustration till two ghosts become
alive again, aware of how the end
of every act of love is separateness;
raw, ruthless lovers, desperate enough
to bank on the absurdity of death
for royal consummation, permanence
of feeling, having, knowing, holding on.
My God, he was a devil of a man
who wrote this music so voluptuous
it sucks me in with possibilities
of sense and soul, of pity and desire
which place and time make ludicrous: I sit
across from you hear in our living room
with chairs and books and red geraniums
and ordinary lamplight on the floor
after an ordinary day of love.
How can disaster be so beautiful?
I range the beaches of our lucid world
against that flood, trying to think about
our child upstairs, asleep with her light on
to keep her from vague evils; about us
whose loving has become so natural
that it has rid itself of teeth and claws,
implements for the lovers new at love,
whose jitters goad them into drawing blood.
But O my love, I cannot beat it back,
neither the sound nor what the sound lets loose;
the opulence of agony drowns out
the hard, dry smack of death against the glass
and batters down the seawalls of my mind,
and I am pulled to levels below light
where easy ways of love are meaningless
and creatures feel their way along the dark
by shock of ecstasy and heat of pain. (55)
My favorite poems, however, are included later in the collection. Both are fairly short, but they combine a powerful vision of life with amazing imagery.
Letter From The End Of The World
The reason no longer matters,
the lamp, my curiosity,
my sisters’ insinuations,
never waking up together,
you saying, “Trust me.”
The point is the end of innocence
comes when you look at someone you love
asleep and see how his eyeballs flicker
under their shallow lids.
The point is since I lost you
I have been going around the world
looking for you and finding myself
instead, small scraps of a woman
that are beginning to fit.
At first the mountains closed ranks against me,
blackberries dried in my mouth,
the wind kept turning to face me.
Wherever I came, the music stopped,
sidewalks opened up manholes,
lights went out,
a pregnant woman shielded her face.
But I learned to sleep on the ground
despite the heartbeat of giant oaks
and the moon’s soft taunts at the sun,
the all-night labor of heaving roots,
the mushroom smell of death.
I learned not to throw the bouquets
the wretched made of their wounds
back in their faces, to accept
tears brought me on red pillows,
to knock on plain white doors
without windows or peepholes, not knowing whose voice would say, “Come in.”
The point is I came back
from the deep places. Always
there was help, a man or woman
who asked no questions, an animal’s
warm body, the itch in my muscles
to climb a swinging rope.
I started out as a girl
without a shadow, in iron shoes;
now, at the end of the world
I am a woman full of rain.
The journey back should be easy;
if this reaches you, wait for me. (104)
Necessities
1
A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas,
but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in.
With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up.
The green smear of the woods we first made love in.
The yellow city we thought was our future.
The red highways not traveled, the green ones
with their missed exits, the black side roads
which took us where we had not meant to go.
The high peaks, recorded by relatives,
though we prefer certain unmarked elevations,
the private alps no one knows we have climbed.
The careful boundaries we draw and erase.
And always, around the edges,
the opaque wash of blue, concealing
the drop-off they have stepped into before us,
singly, maples, not looking back.
2
The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it:
tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off.
Wheels turning but going nowhere.
Paintings flat, with no vanishing point.
The plots of all novels circular;
page numbers reversing themselves past the middle.
The mountaintop no longer a goal,
merely the point between ascent and descent.
All streets looping back on themselves;
life as a beckoning road an absurd idea.
Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods;
the years refusing to drag themselves
toward the new century.
And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead,
no longer a household animal.
3
Answers to questions, an endless supply.
New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us.
All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment
solutions, like kisses or surgery.
Rising inflections countered by level voices,
words beginning with w hushed
by declarative sentences. The small, bould sphere
of the period chasing after the hook,
the doubter that walks on water
and treads air and refuses to go away.
4
Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane
which, at the last moment, we did not take.
The involuntary turn of the head,
which caused the bullet to miss us.
The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight
to the smell of gas. The moon’s
full blessing when we fell in love,
its black mood when it was all over.
Confirm us, we say to the world,
with your weather, your gifts, your warnings,
your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences.
5
Even now, the old things first things,
which taught us language. Things of day and of night.
Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon.
Fire as revolution, grass as the heir
to all revolutions. Snow
as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered.
The river as what we wish it to be.
Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness.
Summits. Chasms. Clearings.
And stars, which gave us the word distance,
so we could name our deepest sadness. (156)
Read
November 24, 2023Favorites (for my record):
•"Immortality":
In Sleeping Beauty's castle / the clock strikes one hundred years [...]
•"Tears"
Only she / carried the sea inside her body.
•"A Short History of the Rose"
Read the history of the mouth, / of the womb, / of places / infinitely desired / and female, / if you want to know / the history / of the rose. / Thorns were added, / a later invention, / It is not certain by whom: / a bitter lover, or / a poet [...]
• "Captivity"
Children never ask / why Beauty did not try to escape / when, after months or years, / the Beast unlocked the door. / They understand surrender, / how the captive, who obeys, / mutely, each detestable order, / finally decides / that the Beast is not a Beast, / but someone beautiful
[...]
So Beauty / stopped weeping and started hoarding / his commands like tokens of love / and asked to be taught his language, / to be given a home.
•"The Blind Leading the Blind"
Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave [...]
•"Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny" : Dead means somebody has to kiss you.
Jenny, we make just dreams / out of our unjust lives
[...]
And what can I, but see / beyond the world that is / when, faithful, you insist / I have the golden key -- / and learn from you once more / the terror and the bliss, / the world as it might be?
•"Life of a Queen"
A crew disassembles / her royal cell. / Outside, a nation / crowns its queen.
•"In Praise of Surfaces"
piecemeal, / I collect you.
•"Sometimes, When the Light"
something secret is going on, / so marvelous and dangerous / that if you crawled through and saw, / you would die, or be happy forever.
•"Voices from the Forest"
Your story does not end / with the wedding dance, it goes on.
•"The Story"
It's called love at first / and doesn't hurt [...]
•"Why We Tell Stories"
Because each of us tells / the same story / but tells it differently
[...]
we will begin our story / with the word 'and'
•"The Exhibit"
A prisoner of war / even after the war was over, / my uncle needs to believe in something / that could not be captured except by love, / whose single luminous horn / redeemed the murderous forest
[...]
This world, / this terrible world we live in, / is not the only possible one [...]
•"Monet Refuses the Operation"
I will not return to a universe / of objects that don't know each other [...]
•"Bedtime Story"
The moon lies on the river / like a drop of oil [...]
•"Romantics"
as if the event / of two bodies meshing together / establishes the degree of love, / forgetting [...] / how a hand / held overlong or a gaze anchored / in someone's eyes could unseat a heart /
[...]
I imagine the two of them / sitting in a garden / among late-blooming roses / and dark cascades of leaves, / letting the landscape speak for them, / leaving us nothing to overhear.
•"Immortality":
In Sleeping Beauty's castle / the clock strikes one hundred years [...]
•"Tears"
Only she / carried the sea inside her body.
•"A Short History of the Rose"
Read the history of the mouth, / of the womb, / of places / infinitely desired / and female, / if you want to know / the history / of the rose. / Thorns were added, / a later invention, / It is not certain by whom: / a bitter lover, or / a poet [...]
• "Captivity"
Children never ask / why Beauty did not try to escape / when, after months or years, / the Beast unlocked the door. / They understand surrender, / how the captive, who obeys, / mutely, each detestable order, / finally decides / that the Beast is not a Beast, / but someone beautiful
[...]
So Beauty / stopped weeping and started hoarding / his commands like tokens of love / and asked to be taught his language, / to be given a home.
•"The Blind Leading the Blind"
Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave [...]
•"Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny" : Dead means somebody has to kiss you.
Jenny, we make just dreams / out of our unjust lives
[...]
And what can I, but see / beyond the world that is / when, faithful, you insist / I have the golden key -- / and learn from you once more / the terror and the bliss, / the world as it might be?
•"Life of a Queen"
A crew disassembles / her royal cell. / Outside, a nation / crowns its queen.
•"In Praise of Surfaces"
piecemeal, / I collect you.
•"Sometimes, When the Light"
something secret is going on, / so marvelous and dangerous / that if you crawled through and saw, / you would die, or be happy forever.
•"Voices from the Forest"
Your story does not end / with the wedding dance, it goes on.
•"The Story"
It's called love at first / and doesn't hurt [...]
•"Why We Tell Stories"
Because each of us tells / the same story / but tells it differently
[...]
we will begin our story / with the word 'and'
•"The Exhibit"
A prisoner of war / even after the war was over, / my uncle needs to believe in something / that could not be captured except by love, / whose single luminous horn / redeemed the murderous forest
[...]
This world, / this terrible world we live in, / is not the only possible one [...]
•"Monet Refuses the Operation"
I will not return to a universe / of objects that don't know each other [...]
•"Bedtime Story"
The moon lies on the river / like a drop of oil [...]
•"Romantics"
as if the event / of two bodies meshing together / establishes the degree of love, / forgetting [...] / how a hand / held overlong or a gaze anchored / in someone's eyes could unseat a heart /
[...]
I imagine the two of them / sitting in a garden / among late-blooming roses / and dark cascades of leaves, / letting the landscape speak for them, / leaving us nothing to overhear.
May 14, 2022
THE EXHIBIT
My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
ever existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.
A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER
Such insignificance: a glance
at your record on the doctor’s desk
or a letter not meant for you.
How could you have known? It’s not true
that your life passes before you
in rapid motion, but your watch
suddenly ticks like an amplified heart,
the hands freezing against a white
that is a judgment. Otherwise, nothing.
The face in the mirror is still yours.
Two men pass on the sidewalk
and do not stare at your window.
Your room is silent, the plants
locked inside their mysterious lives
as always. The queen of the night
refuses to bloom, does not accept
your definition. It makes no sense,
your scanning the street for a traffic snarl,
a new crack in the pavement,
a flag at half-mast—signs
of some disturbance in the world,
some recognition that the sun
has turned its dark face toward you.
WHEN I AM ASKED
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
LATE HOURS
On summer nights the world
moves within earshot
on the interstate with its swish
and growl, an occasional siren
that sends chills through us.
Sometimes, on clear, still nights,
voices float into our bedroom,
lunar and fragmented,
as if the sky had let them go
long before our birth.
In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for his world.
What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.
My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
ever existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.
A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER
Such insignificance: a glance
at your record on the doctor’s desk
or a letter not meant for you.
How could you have known? It’s not true
that your life passes before you
in rapid motion, but your watch
suddenly ticks like an amplified heart,
the hands freezing against a white
that is a judgment. Otherwise, nothing.
The face in the mirror is still yours.
Two men pass on the sidewalk
and do not stare at your window.
Your room is silent, the plants
locked inside their mysterious lives
as always. The queen of the night
refuses to bloom, does not accept
your definition. It makes no sense,
your scanning the street for a traffic snarl,
a new crack in the pavement,
a flag at half-mast—signs
of some disturbance in the world,
some recognition that the sun
has turned its dark face toward you.
WHEN I AM ASKED
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
LATE HOURS
On summer nights the world
moves within earshot
on the interstate with its swish
and growl, an occasional siren
that sends chills through us.
Sometimes, on clear, still nights,
voices float into our bedroom,
lunar and fragmented,
as if the sky had let them go
long before our birth.
In winter we close the windows
and read Chekhov,
nearly weeping for his world.
What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.
September 19, 2018
Sometimes I think much contemporary poetry is written in an effort to confuse people and leave them wondering what on earth the poet is trying to say. But that’s not the case with this beautiful collection which won Lisel Mueller the Pulitzer prize in 1997. I’ve checked it out of the library so often that it’s a wonder I’m not able to recite most of what’s in it by heart.
Nevertheless, I have a hard time explaining just exactly what it is about her poetry that speaks to me other than to say I think it has to do with her ability to express a range of ordinary moments – including the quietly gentle to the profoundly disturbing – in such a luminous way.
She has a gift for using language to capture what ordinary words only hint at -like she does here in this excerpt from her poem, Hope:
Nevertheless, I have a hard time explaining just exactly what it is about her poetry that speaks to me other than to say I think it has to do with her ability to express a range of ordinary moments – including the quietly gentle to the profoundly disturbing – in such a luminous way.
She has a gift for using language to capture what ordinary words only hint at -like she does here in this excerpt from her poem, Hope:
…It is the singular giftIf everyone writing poetry today could write like that I’d read more poetry!!
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
October 23, 2025
4.5 stars.
I bought this based entirely on a single poem, "There Are Mornings," that I came across on Tumblr. And I'm so glad I read the full collection! The poems felt lived in, if that makes sense: they didn't leave me struggling to interpret meaning but never spoon-fed that meaning either. The experiences were often specific to the poet, and yet I empathized with so many of the topics she explored, from the love and loss of parents to the dichotomy between place and placelessness and how you can never reclaim a place at a particular moment. Her writing was lush without being purple, descriptive but not overly so, and while I didn't notice the line breaks very often, when I did they were purposeful and enhanced a word choice or emotion.
I bought this based entirely on a single poem, "There Are Mornings," that I came across on Tumblr. And I'm so glad I read the full collection! The poems felt lived in, if that makes sense: they didn't leave me struggling to interpret meaning but never spoon-fed that meaning either. The experiences were often specific to the poet, and yet I empathized with so many of the topics she explored, from the love and loss of parents to the dichotomy between place and placelessness and how you can never reclaim a place at a particular moment. Her writing was lush without being purple, descriptive but not overly so, and while I didn't notice the line breaks very often, when I did they were purposeful and enhanced a word choice or emotion.
What luxury, to be so happy
that we can grieve
over imaginary lives.
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you
March 29, 2020
Alive Together was the perfect collection to read and savor during this strange, unmooring season. Lisel Mueller’s steady, quiet poetry illuminates the beauty and difficulty of living in our world, and she achieves this without pretension. Mueller hones in on the mundane - picking raspberries, admiring art, reflecting on childhood, celebrating her daughter’s thirteenth birthday, experiencing the mystery of touching another - and elevates these commonplace occurrences to the most divine parts of existence. I re-read each poem at least three times, learning so much from Mueller’s turns of phrase and eye for the holy mundane. I’ll end with my favorite quote from the collection’s titular poem:
“Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun...”
“Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun...”
July 23, 2020
From "The Power of Music to Disturb"
"It is music that luxuriates
in the impossibilities of love
and rides frustration till two ghosts become
alive again, aware of how the end
of every act of love is separateness;
raw, ruthless lovers, desperate enough
to bank on the absurdity of death
for royal consummation, permanence
of feeling, having, knowing, holding on."
"But O my love, I cannot beat it back,
neither the sound nor what the sound lets loose;
the opulence of agony drowns out
the hard, dry smack of death against the glass
and batters down the seawalls of my mind,
and I am pulled to the levels below light
where easy ways of love are meaningless
and creatures feel their way along the dark
by shock of ecstasy and heat of pain."
oh my heart...
"It is music that luxuriates
in the impossibilities of love
and rides frustration till two ghosts become
alive again, aware of how the end
of every act of love is separateness;
raw, ruthless lovers, desperate enough
to bank on the absurdity of death
for royal consummation, permanence
of feeling, having, knowing, holding on."
"But O my love, I cannot beat it back,
neither the sound nor what the sound lets loose;
the opulence of agony drowns out
the hard, dry smack of death against the glass
and batters down the seawalls of my mind,
and I am pulled to the levels below light
where easy ways of love are meaningless
and creatures feel their way along the dark
by shock of ecstasy and heat of pain."
oh my heart...
April 14, 2021
How did I go so long not knowing Lisel Mueller? She (along with Jane Kenyon) have been my best poetry discoveries over the last two years. Nearly every poem took my breath away: sharp, perceptive, haunting and celebratory. Everything from classical music to bees to fairytales to the simple joy and luck of being "alive together" comes under her careful and poised microscope. I want to share all of these poems with people I love, and if that isn't the mark of a good book of poetry, I don't know what is.
February 19, 2022
Stunning. You might call it prosetry, less meter and rhyme, but short snippets of brilliant thought, perfect for the poetry sections of the New Yorker or Atlantic.
I highlighted much of the book, and hope to order a physical copy to reread.
Alive Together is one of the most shocking and beautiful poems - an exploration of life as it is and could have been.
I love her exploration of femininity in Mary Shelley, the Laughter of Women and Tears.
Also love her quirky insight in Monet Refuses the Operation and The Possessive Case
Great, great, great collection.
I highlighted much of the book, and hope to order a physical copy to reread.
Alive Together is one of the most shocking and beautiful poems - an exploration of life as it is and could have been.
I love her exploration of femininity in Mary Shelley, the Laughter of Women and Tears.
Also love her quirky insight in Monet Refuses the Operation and The Possessive Case
Great, great, great collection.
May 16, 2020
This was a beautiful collection of poetry, full of wisdom and heart and beautiful language. I enjoyed Mueller’s reflections on music in particular: “It was as if music were a night-blooming flower that would not open until we held our breath. Then the full-blown sound, the single-minded combat of passion: voices sharpening their glittering blades on one another, electing to live or die. It was that simple.”
October 31, 2020
A wonderful collection of her poetry. Pretty direct and definitely adult verse dealing with the vicissitudes of life and of course death. Her family immigrated from Germany in the late thirties when she was a child but her European roots are often visible whether writing about classical music or paintings. I enjoyed very much this collection and recommend it as an antidote to much of todays discontinuous abrupt chaotic production. ( Pardon me please if my age is showing)
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